OpenAI’s Sam Altman announces Pentagon deal with ‘technical safeguards’

OpenAI’s Sam Altman announces Pentagon deal with ‘technical safeguards’

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced late on Friday that his company has reached an settlement permitting the Department of Defense to make use of its AI fashions in the division’s categorized network.

This follows a high-profile standoff between the division — also recognized under the Trump administration as the Department of War — and OpenAI’s rival Anthropic. The Pentagon pushed AI firms, including Anthropic, to permit their fashions be used “all lawful purposes,” while Anthropic sought to attract a pink line round mass home surveillance and absolutely autonomous weapons.

In a prolonged assertion launched Thursday, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said the company “never raised objections to particular military operations nor attempted to limit use of our technology in an ad hoc manner,” however he argued that “in a narrow set of cases, we believe AI can undermine, rather than defend, democratic values.”

More than 60 OpenAI workers and 300 Google workers signed an open letter this week asking their employers to help Anthropic’s place.

After Anthropic and the Pentagon failed to achieve an settlement, President Donald Trump criticized the “Leftwing nut jobs at Anthropic” in a social media submit that also directed federal companies to cease utilizing the company’s merchandise after a six-month section out interval.

In a separate submit, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth claimed Anthropic was making an attempt to “seize veto power over the operational decisions of the United States military.” Hegseth also said he’s designating Anthropic as a supply-chain danger: “Effective immediately, no contractor, supplier, or partner that does business with the United States military may conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic.”

On Friday, Anthropic said it had “not yet received direct communication from the Department of War or the White House on the status of our negotiations,” however insisted it might “challenge any supply chain risk designation in court.”

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Surprisingly, Altman claimed in a submit on X that OpenAI’s new protection contract consists of protections addressing the same points that turned a flashpoint for Anthropic.

“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,” Altman said. “The DoW agrees with these principles, reflects them in law and policy, and we put them into our agreement.”

Altman said OpenAI “will build technical safeguards to ensure our models behave as they should, which the DoW also wanted,” and it’ll deploy engineers with the Pentagon “to help with our models and to ensure their safety.”

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

Fortune’s Sharon Goldman reviews that Altman told OpenAI workers at an all-hands assembly that the authorities will permit the company to build its personal “safety stack” to stop misuse, and that “if the model refuses to do a task, then the government would not force OpenAI to make it do that task.”

Altman’s submit got here shortly before news broke that the U.S. and Israeli governments have begun bombing Iran, with Trump calling for the overthrow of the Iranian authorities.

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