OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced late Friday that his company had reached an agreement with the Department of Defense that would allow it to use its AI models on the Pentagon’s classified networks.
This follows a high-profile standoff between the department, also known as the Department of War, under the Trump administration, and OpenAI rival Anthropic. The Pentagon has pressured AI companies, including Anthropic, to allow their models to be used for “all lawful purposes,” while Anthropic has sought to draw a line against large-scale domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons.
In a lengthy statement released Thursday, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said the company has “never objected to any specific military operation or attempted to limit the use of our technology in any specific military operation.” for this But he argued, “We believe that AI can undermine democratic values, rather than defend them.”
More than 60 OpenAI employees and more than 300 Google employees signed an open letter this week asking their employers to support Anthropic’s position.
After Anthropic and the Department of Defense failed to reach an agreement, President Donald Trump criticized “Anthropic’s left-wing crazy job” in a social media post and ordered federal agencies to stop using the company’s products after a six-month phase-out period.
In a separate post, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth claimed Anthropic was trying to “seize veto power over U.S. military operational decisions.” Hegseth said he is also labeling Anthropic as a supply chain risk. “Effective immediately, contractors, suppliers or partners doing business with the U.S. military will not be able to conduct any commercial activities with Anthropic.”
On Friday, Anthropic said it “has not yet received direct communication from the War Department or the White House regarding the status of the negotiations” but insisted it “will contest the supply chain risk designation in court.”
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Surprisingly, Altman claimed in his post on
“The two most important safety principles are prohibition of domestic mass surveillance and human responsibility for the use of force, including autonomous weapons systems,” Altman said. “DoW agrees with these principles, reflects them in laws and policies, and puts them into agreements.”
Altman said OpenAI will “build technical safeguards to ensure our models perform the way DoW also wanted them to,” and “will deploy engineers at the Department of Defense to assist our models and ensure their safety.”
“We are asking the DoW to offer the same terms to all AI companies, and we think everyone should be willing to accept that,” Altman added. “We have expressed our strong desire to deescalate the situation away from legal and government action and towards a reasonable agreement.”
Fortune’s Sharon Goldman reports that Altman told OpenAI employees at an all-hands meeting that the government would allow the company to build its own “safety stack” to prevent misuse and that “if a model refuses to perform a task, the government will not force OpenAI to perform that task.”
Altman’s post came just before news broke that the U.S. and Israeli governments had begun bombing Iran as President Trump called for the overthrow of the Iranian government.
