OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman on Saturday announced that the company has reached an agreement with the US Department of War to deploy its AI models within the authority’s classified network. The development comes at a time when US President Donald Trump has banned every federal agency from using Anthropic.In a post on X, Altman wrote, “Tonight, we reached an agreement with the Department of War to deploy our models in their classified network. In all of our interactions, the DoW displayed a deep respect for safety and a desire to partner to achieve the best possible outcome.”He said, “AI safety and wide distribution of benefits are the core of our mission. 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. The DoW agrees with these principles, reflects them in law and policy, and we put them into our agreement.”The tech entrepreneur added that the company will build technical safeguards to ensure its models behave as intended, in line with the DoW’s requirements. Additionally, FDEs will be deployed to support the models and that, for safety, the systems will run only on cloud networks.Altman said that OpenAI has urged the US department of war “to offer these same terms to all AI companies, which in our opinion we think everyone should be willing to accept. We have expressed our strong desire to see things de-escalate away from legal and governmental actions and towards reasonable agreements.”Meanwhile, OpenAI and Amazon also reached a multi-year strategic partnership to speed up artificial intelligence innovation across enterprises, start-ups and consumer applications worldwide.Under the agreement, Amazon will invest $50 billion in OpenAI. The company said the commitment begins with $15 billion upfront, with a further $35 billion to follow in the coming months once specified conditions are satisfied.The collaboration also includes the joint development of a Stateful Runtime Environment powered by OpenAI’s models, which will be offered through Amazon Bedrock.According to the statement, stateful developer environments represent the next phase in the use of frontier AI models. They enable systems to seamlessly access resources such as compute, memory and identity. This comes amid Trump’s orders directing agencies to stop using Anthropic “immediately, calling the company’s leadership “Leftwing nut jobs” in a Truth Social post and intensifying tensions between the White House and the Pentagon’s AI suppliers.The standoff has split Silicon Valley, with Elon Musk publicly backing the administration, while Sam Altman voiced sympathy for Anthropic’s safety concerns, saying he largely trusted the company’s intentions.
