By Asiye Latife Yilmaz
ISTANBUL (AA) - Sam Altman said late Friday that OpenAI reached an agreement with the Pentagon to deploy its AI models in classified military systems after the department accepted safety red lines similar to those proposed by rival Anthropic.
“Tonight, we reached an agreement with the Department of War to deploy our models in their classified network. In all of our interactions, the DoW displayed a deep respect for safety and a desire to partner to achieve the best possible outcome,” Altman said on US social media company X.
The deal comes as US President Donald Trump ordered federal agencies to stop using Anthropic tools, while Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth labeled the firm a “supply chain risk” over its refusal to ease restrictions on AI use in autonomous weapons and mass surveillance.
“Two of our most important safety principles are prohibitions on domestic mass surveillance and human responsibility for the use of force, including for autonomous weapon systems,” Altman said.
He added that the Department of War agrees with these principles and “reflects them in law and policy, and we put them into our agreement.”
“We also will build technical safeguards to ensure our models behave as they should, which the DoW also wanted,” Altman said, adding that they will send forward deployed engineers to the Pentagon to support their models and ensure safety, with systems operating only on cloud networks.
“We are asking the DoW to offer these same terms to all AI companies, which in our opinion we think everyone should be willing to accept. We have expressed our strong desire to see things de-escalate away from legal and governmental actions and towards reasonable agreements,” Altman added.
Anthropic also said Friday it will legally challenge the “supply chain risk” designation, typically reserved for firms tied to foreign adversaries, which would require military contractors to prove their work does not involve its products.