OpenAI chief Sam Altman on Saturday said that the company has reached an agreement with the United States Department of Defense, to deploy its models in the Pentagon’s classified network.
In a post on social media platform X (formerly known as Twitter), where Altman used the new name ‘Department of War’ and DoW, he said that their interactions “displayed a deep respect for safety and a desire to partner to achieve the best possible outcome”.
‘AI safety, distribution of benefits’ are core missions: Altman
According to Altman, the ChatGPT-maker holds “AI safety and wide distribution of benefits” as its core missions, adding that “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 language reflects sticking points in the clash between Claude-maker Anthropic and the Pentagon, which has pushed for full military use of AI tools for “all lawful purposes”. This includes use even in “most sensitive areas of weapons development, intelligence collection, and battlefield operations”, as per an Axios report.
However, Altman stated that the principles have not been compromised. “The DoW agrees with these principles, reflects them in law and policy, and we put them into our agreement,” he wrote.
Sam Altman on Pentagon deal: What does it include?
We also will build technical safeguards to ensure our models behave as they should, which the DoW also wanted. We will deploy FDEs to help with our models and to ensure their safety, we will deploy on cloud networks only.
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. We have expressed our strong desire to see things de-escalate away from legal and governmental actions and towards reasonable agreements.
We remain committed to serve all of humanity as best we can. The world is a complicated, messy, and sometimes dangerous place.
(This is a breaking story, more updates to come…)