OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced on Saturday that the company has reached an agreement with the US War Department to deploy its AI models within the agency’s secretive network. This development comes at a time when US President Donald Trump has banned every federal agency from using Anthropics.In a post on“AI safety and broad distribution of benefits are at the core of our mission,” he said. “Two of our most important safety principles are the prohibition of domestic mass surveillance and human responsibility for the use of force, including autonomous weapons systems.”
The Department of Labor agrees to these principles, reflects them in law and policy, and places them in our agreement.
The technology entrepreneur added that the company will build technical safeguards to ensure that its models work as intended, in line with Department of Labor requirements. In addition, FDEs will be deployed to support the models, and for safety, the systems will only run on cloud networks.OpenAI has urged the US War Department “to offer the same terms to all AI companies, which in our view we believe everyone should be willing to accept,” Altman said.
We have expressed our strong desire to calm matters beyond legal and governmental procedures and to reach reasonable agreements.Meanwhile, OpenAI and Amazon have also reached a multi-year strategic partnership to accelerate AI innovation across enterprises, startups, and consumer applications around the world.Under the agreement, Amazon will invest $50 billion in OpenAI. The company said the commitment begins with $15 billion up front, then another $35 billion will follow in the coming months once specific conditions are met.The collaboration also includes joint development of the official operating environment powered by OpenAI models, which will be delivered through Amazon Bedrock.According to the statement, stateful development environments represent the next stage in the use of frontier AI models. It enables systems to seamlessly access resources such as computation, memory, and identity. This comes amid Trump’s orders directing agencies to stop using Anthropic “immediately,” calling the company’s leadership “left-wing jobs” in a post on Truth Social and intensifying tensions between the White House and the Pentagon’s AI suppliers.The standoff has divided Silicon Valley, with Elon Musk publicly supporting the administration and Sam Altman expressing sympathy for Anthropic’s safety concerns, saying he largely trusts the company’s intentions.
