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OpenAI CEO Sam Altman publicly defended his company’s new Pentagon deal on Saturday, just a day after President Donald Trump ordered federal agencies to cut ties with rival Anthropic.
Hours after the US and Israel launched a joint attack on Iran, Altman turned to
“I would like to answer questions about our work with the DoW and our thinking in recent days,” he said.
In announcing the agreement late Friday, Altman wrote: “AI security and broad benefit sharing are at the core of our mission. Two of our core security principles are the prohibition of domestic mass surveillance and human responsibility for the use of force, including for autonomous weapons systems. The DoW agrees with these principles, reflects them in law and policy, and we have incorporated them into our agreement.”
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OpenAI CEO Sam Altman defended his company’s Pentagon deal after President Donald Trump ordered federal agencies to phase out rival Anthropic. (Nathan Howard/Bloomberg via Getty Images/Getty Images)
The OpenAI deal came as Trump ordered every federal agency to stop using anthropic technology, instituted a six-month phase-out period and intensified the dispute over how AI should be used in military operations.
Secretary of War Pete Hegseth said he directed the department to designate Anthropic as a “supply chain risk to national security.”
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei had refused DoW demands to allow its AI to be used for “all lawful purposes,” citing concerns about “mass domestic surveillance” and “fully autonomous weapons.”
When asked why the DoW accepted OpenAI but not Anthropic, Altman said, “Anthropic seemed more focused on specific prohibitions in the contract, rather than citing applicable laws, which we were comfortable with.” He added that Anthropic “perhaps wanted to have more operational control than we did.”
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President Donald Trump has ordered federal agencies to cut ties with Anthropic, further fueling the dispute over military AI use. (Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images/Getty Images)
Altman said the DoW did not make any explicit or implicit threats before the agreement was reached, adding that Pentagon officials were “genuinely surprised that we were willing” to consider classified work.
He said OpenAI initially planned to do only non-classified work with the Pentagon, but talks accelerated this week.
“We thought the DoW clearly needed an AI partner, and doing classified work is clearly much more complex. We said no to previous deals in classified environments that Anthropic has done. We started talking to the DoW many months ago about our non-classified work. This week, things on the classified side kicked into high gear. We felt the DoW was flexible about what we needed, and we want to support them in their very important mission,” Altman said.
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Sam Altman answered questions on X about OpenAI’s secret work with the War Department. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images/Getty Images)
Altman also criticized that the agreement seemed hasty, and said OpenAI took swift action to “de-escalate the situation.”
“I think the current course is dangerous for anthropic, healthy competition and the US,” he said. “We negotiated to ensure that similar terms would be offered to all other AI labs.”
Altman acknowledged that he remains concerned that a future legal dispute could expose OpenAI to the same supply chain risk designation imposed on Anthropic.
“If we have to fight that battle, we will, but it clearly exposes us to some risk,” he said. “I’m still hopeful that this will be resolved, and one of the reasons we wanted to act quickly was to increase the likelihood of that happening.”
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OpenAI CEO Sam Altman arrives to testify before a Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation hearing titled “Winning the AI Race: Strengthening America’s Capabilities in Computing and Innovation,” on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, on May 8. (Jonathan Ernst/Reuters/Reuters)
Altman also raised questions about whether the federal government might try to nationalize OpenAI or other AI developments.
“I obviously don’t know; I’ve thought about it, of course… but it doesn’t seem very likely on the current trajectory,” he said. “That said, I think close collaboration between governments and the companies building this technology is super important.”
Altman said the most difficult aspect of the agreement to reconcile concerned “foreign oversight.”
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“I have accepted that the US military is going to surveil foreigners in a certain way, and I know foreign governments are trying to do that to us, but I still don’t like it,” he said. “I think it’s really important that society thinks about the consequences of this; perhaps the one principle I care about most about AI is that it is democratized, and I see surveillance making that worse.”
“On the other hand, I also respect the democratic process. I don’t think this is up to me to decide,” he added.
