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OpenAI has reached an agreement<\/a> with the Defense Department to deploy its models in the agency\u2019s network, company chief Sam Altman has revealed on X. In his post, he said two of OpenAI\u2019s most important safety principles are \u201cprohibitions on domestic mass surveillance and human responsibility for the use of force, including for autonomous weapon systems.\u201d Altman claimed the company put those principles in its agreement with the agency, which he called by the government\u2019s preferred name of Department of War (DoW), and that it had agreed to honor them.<\/p>\n The agency has closed the deal with OpenAI, shortly after President Donald Trump ordered<\/a> all government agencies to stop using Claude and any other Anthropic services. If you\u2019ll recall, US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth previously threatened to label Anthropic \u201csupply chain risk\u201d if it continues refusing to remove the guardrails on its AI, which are preventing the technology to be used for mass surveillance against Americans and in fully autonomous weapons.<\/p>\n It\u2019s unclear why the government agreed to team up with OpenAI if its models also have the same guardrails, but Altman said it\u2019s asking the government to offer the same terms to all the AI companies it works with. Jeremy Lewin, the Senior Official Under Secretary for Foreign Assistance, Humanitarian Affairs, and Religious Freedom, said on X<\/a> that DoW \u201creferences certain existing legal authorities and includes certain mutually agreed upon safety mechanisms\u201d in its contracts. Both OpenAI and xAI, which had also previously signed a deal to deploy Grok<\/a> in the DoW\u2019s classified systems, agreed to those terms. He said it was the same \u201ccompromise that Anthropic was offered, and rejected.\u201d<\/p>\n Anthropic, which started working with the US government<\/a> in 2024, refused<\/a> to bow down to Hegseth. In its latest statement, published just hours before Altman announced OpenAI\u2019s agreement, it repeated its stance. \u201cNo amount of intimidation or punishment from the Department of War will change our position on mass domestic surveillance or fully autonomous weapons,\u201d Anthropic wrote. \u201cWe will challenge any supply chain risk designation in court.\u201d<\/p>\n Altman added in his post on X that OpenAI will build technical safeguards to ensure the company\u2019s models behave as they should, claiming that\u2019s also what the DoW wanted. It\u2019s sending engineers to work with the agency to \u201censure [its models\u2019] safety,\u201d and it will only deploy on cloud networks. As The New York Times<\/em><\/a> notes, OpenAI is not yet on Amazon cloud, which the government uses. But that could change soon, as company has also just announced<\/a> forming a partnership with Amazon to run its models on Amazon Web Services (AWS) for enterprise customers.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n