OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, said on Friday that it had reached an agreement with the Pentagon to provide its artificial intelligence technologies for classified systems, just hours after President Trump ordered federal agencies to stop using A.I. technology made by rival Anthropic.
Sam Altman, OpenAI’s chief executive, has been in talks with the Pentagon since Wednesday in an effort reach an agreement, said two people familiar with the discussions who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Mr. Altman’s talks came as Anthropic and the Pentagon have been pitted against each other. The Pentagon had demanded that Anthropic provide unfettered access to its A.I. system without the guardrails the company wanted, or it would be cut off from government business. Anthropic had insisted it did not want its A.I. technology to be used for domestic surveillance of Americans or for autonomous lethal weapons.
Late Friday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth designated Anthropic as a “supply-chain risk to national security” after the Pentagon and the company failed to reach an agreement over the use of A.I.
“In all of our interactions, the DoW displayed a deep respect for safety and a desire to partner to achieve the best possible outcome,” Mr. Altman said in a post to social media, using the initials for the Department of War, the administration’s preferred name for the Department of Defense.
Earlier in the day, Mr. Altman had said that like Anthropic, OpenAI did not want its technologies used for domestic surveillance or with autonomous weapons. But he said OpenAI had found a way to work on classified operations without violating those principles.
In its discussions with the Pentagon, OpenAI established the right to put safeguards into its technologies that would somehow prevent the systems from being used in ways that it does not want them to be, he said.
“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,” Mr. Altman said. “The DoW agrees with these principles, reflects them in law and policy, and we put them into our agreement.”
Mr. Altman added that the Pentagon had agreed to have some OpenAI employees work alongside government personnel on classified projects to “to help with our models and to ensure their safety.”
This, however, will not happen immediately. OpenAI is not yet approved for classified work in part because its technologies are not available from Amazon’s cloud computing services, which is how the government often uses classified systems.
But that could change after OpenAI signed a partnership with Amazon on Friday. Amazon, a new investor in OpenAI, is pouring $50 billion into the A.I. start-up as part of $110 billion in funding that OpenAI raised to pay for its continued growth and to fuel the development of A.I.
This is a developing news story. Stay tuned for updates.
Cade Metz is a Times reporter who writes about artificial intelligence, driverless cars, robotics, virtual reality and other emerging areas of technology.
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