OpenAI Inks Deal With Pentagon Amid Anthropic Clash

This agreement will see OpenAI deploy its models on the U.S. Department of War’s (DoW) classified network, CEO Sam Altman wrote in a post Friday (Feb. 27) on X. 

Altman said two of his company’s key safety principles are a ban on using its technology for domestic mass surveillance and “human responsibility for the use of force,” such as autonomous weapon systems.

“The DoW agrees with these principles, reflects them in law and policy, and we put them into our agreement,” he said. “We also will build technical safeguards to ensure our models behave as they should, which the DoW also wanted.

“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,” Altman wrote. 

“We have expressed our strong desire to see things de-escalate away from legal and governmental actions and towards reasonable agreements.”

The agreement came soon after President Donald Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced that the Pentagon will end its contract with rival AI startup Anthropic.

The White House gave Anthropic six months until it is cut off from government contracts. 

“I am directing every federal agency in the United States government to immediately cease all use of Anthropic’s technology. We don’t need it, we don’t want it and will not do business with them again!” Trump  in a post on Truth Social.

The conflict stems from Anthropic objecting to DoW’s use of its Claude model for autonomous weapons and domestic surveillance. The Pentagon has since labeled Anthropic a supply-chain risk, something the company says is illegal.

“Legally, a supply chain risk designation … can only extend to the use of Claude as part of Department of War contracts — it cannot affect how contractors use Claude to serve other customers,” the company wrote on its website as it promised to take legal action against the Pentagon on Friday.

Also Friday, OpenAI announced it had raised $110 million from Amazon, Nvidia and Softbank. This deal will see the latter two companies each contribute $30 billion. Amazon’s contribution will start with an initial commitment of $15 billion, with another $35 billion “in the coming months when certain conditions are met,” the companies said in their announcement.

A report from The Information last week said those conditions could include OpenAI going public, or achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI), a type of AI that can perform at or above the level of humans.

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