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OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced Friday that his company reached an agreement with the Department of War to deploy its artificial intelligence models on its classified network, just hours after President Donald Trump ordered federal agencies to phase out rival Anthropic.
Altman said in a post on X that he had been in talks with the Pentagon, which “displayed a deep respect for safety and a desire to partner to achieve the best possible outcome.”
“AI safety and wide distribution of benefits are the core of our mission,” 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. The DoW agrees with these principles, reflects them in law and policy, and we put them into our agreement.”
The deal came after Trump directed every federal agency to stop using Anthropic technology, escalating a standoff over how artificial intelligence should be used in military operations.
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OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced an agreement with the Department of War to deploy the company’s AI models on classified military networks. (Nathan Laine/Bloomberg via Getty Images / Getty Images)
In a Truth Social post, Trump said agencies, including the Department of War, would have a six-month phase-out period.
“Anthropic better get their act together, and be helpful during this phase out period, or I will use the Full Power of the Presidency to make them comply, with major civil and criminal consequences to follow,” he wrote.
Secretary of War Pete Hegseth later said he was directing the department to designate Anthropic a “supply-chain risk to National Security.”
“Effective immediately, no contractor, supplier, or partner that does business with the United States military may conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic,” he added. “Anthropic will continue to provide the Department of War its services for a period of no more than six months to allow for a seamless transition to a better and more patriotic service.”
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President Donald Trump ordered federal agencies to phase out Anthropic technology as OpenAI secured a Pentagon agreement. (Al Drago/Getty Images / Getty Images)
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei had refused earlier demands from the Department of War to allow its AI to be used for “all lawful purposes,” citing concerns about “mass domestic surveillance” and “fully autonomous weapons.”
Anthropic told Fox News Digital on Friday that Hegseth’s designation of the company as a supply chain risk “follows months of negotiations that reached an impasse over two exceptions we requested to the lawful use of our AI model, Claude: the mass domestic surveillance of Americans and fully autonomous weapons.”
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The Pentagon moved forward with an OpenAI agreement after designating Anthropic a supply-chain risk. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images / Getty Images)
“We have not yet received direct communication from the Department of War or the White House on the status of our negotiations,” the company said.
Anthropic added that it “tried in good faith to reach an agreement with the Department of War,” supporting all lawful national security uses of AI except the two requested exceptions, which it said “have not affected a single government mission to date.”
The company also called the supply chain risk designation an “unprecedented action — one historically reserved for US adversaries, never before publicly applied to an American company.”
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Altman said OpenAI would deploy additional safeguards to ensure its models “behave as they should,” and that the company would operate only on cloud networks.
“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 continued. “We have expressed our strong desire to see things de-escalate away from legal and governmental actions and towards reasonable agreements.”
FOX Business’ Brie Stimson contributed to this report.
