Sam Altman reveals OpenAI Pentagon partnership with built-in technical safeguards

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said late Friday that his company has finalised an agreement that will allow the Department of Defence to use OpenAI’s AI models inside the department’s classified network.

The announcement comes after a widely watched standoff between the DoD — which has also been referred to under the Trump administration as the Department of War — and OpenAI competitor Anthropic. The Pentagon had pressed AI companies, including Anthropic, to permit their models to be used for “all lawful purposes.” At the same time, Anthropic tried to maintain clear restrictions around mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons.

In a detailed public statement released 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,” but argued that “in a narrow set of cases, we believe AI can undermine, rather than defend, democratic values.”

This week, more than 60 OpenAI employees and 300 Google employees signed an open letter urging their employers to back Anthropic’s position.

After Anthropic and the Pentagon were unable to come to terms, President Donald Trump blasted the “Left-wing nut jobs at Anthropic” in a social media post that also instructed federal agencies to stop using the company’s products following a six-month phase-out period.

In a separate message, Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth accused Anthropic of trying to “seize veto power over the operational decisions of the United States military.” Hegseth also said he was designating Anthropic as a supply-chain risk, writing: “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,” but said it would “challenge any supply chain risk designation in court.”

In a notable twist, Altman posted on X that OpenAI’s new defence agreement includes protections for the same issues that became central to Anthropic’s dispute with the Pentagon.

“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 also said OpenAI “will build technical safeguards to ensure our models behave as they should, which the DoW also wanted,” and that the company will place engineers alongside 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, 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 reported that Altman told OpenAI employees during an all-hands meeting that the government would allow the company to create its own “safety stack” aimed at preventing 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 post arrived shortly before reports emerged that the U.S. and Israeli governments had begun bombing Iran, with Trump calling for the overthrow of the Iranian government.