OpenAI Will Deploy AI in US Military Classified Networks
Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning
,
Government
,
Industry Specific
Announcement Comes Hours After Trump Blacklists Anthropic
OpenAI said late Friday night it reached an agreement with the U.S. Department of Defense to deploy its large language models onto military classified networks.
See Also: Compliance Team Guide for Evasion Prevention & Sanction Exposure Detection
The announcement, made by company CEO Sam Altman on social media network X, came hours after President Donald Trump instructed federal agencies to cease using AI developed by OpenAI rival Anthropic. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said he designated Anthropic a “supply chain risk,” blacklisting the company from receiving Pentagon business (see: Trump Escalates AI Clash With Anthropic).
Altman said that defense officials agreed with OpenAI executives on the importance of “prohibitions on domestic mass surveillance and human responsibility for the use of force, including for autonomous weapon systems.”
“We also will build technical safeguards to ensure our models behave as they should, which the DoW also wanted,” he said, referring to Defense with the Trump administration’s preferred moniker of “Department of War.”
Altman also said he asked government officials to offer the same terms to all AI companies and to “see things de-escalate away from legal and governmental actions and towards reasonable agreements.”
Anthropic and the Pentagon have been locked in a disagreement over how the military may use Anthropic’s Claude model. Defense officials have reportedly pushed for broad flexibility across intelligence, cyber and battlefield support functions, while Anthropic wants to preserve restrictions on domestic surveillance and autonomous weapons applications.
“We will not knowingly provide a product that puts America’s warfighters and civilians at risk,” Amodei said in a statement Thursday.
How quickly OpenAI technology can be integrated into classified networks is uncertain. Claude has been the only foundation model approved for use in certain classified Defense environments. Potentially speeding up its introduction could be the partnership OpenAI announced Friday with Amazon Web Services. The two companies will create a runtime environment on the Amazon Bedrock platform – an offering that is recognized by the federal government as suitable for very sensitive, albeit unclassified, data.