OpenAI
AI company that struck a Pentagon classified network deal hours after rival Anthropic was blacklisted, despite CEO Sam Altman claiming to share Anthropic's safety "red lines."
OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT and GPT models, was one of four AI companies contracted by the Pentagon in the summer of 2025. Unlike Anthropic, OpenAI agreed to the Pentagon’s terms.
Position
OpenAI lifted its consumer-facing guardrails for Pentagon use and deployed ChatGPT in unclassified military settings. The company’s compliance stood in stark contrast to Anthropic’s refusal, highlighting a fundamental divergence in how the two AI labs — both founded with stated commitments to beneficial AI — approached the question of military use.
The Classified Network Deal
On February 27, 2026, hours after the Trump administration banned Anthropic from all federal government use and designated it a supply chain risk, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced his company had struck a deal with the Defense Department to deploy its models on classified military networks — replacing Anthropic’s Claude.
In a memo to employees, Altman stated OpenAI shared the same “red lines” as Anthropic regarding military AI use. It was never publicly explained why the Pentagon accepted this from OpenAI while blacklisting Anthropic for the same position.
Historical Context
Notably, Anthropic was founded in 2021 by researchers who left OpenAI, partly over disagreements about the company’s direction on safety and governance. The two companies’ divergent responses to the Pentagon’s demands echoed those original disagreements — and OpenAI’s willingness to quickly fill the void left by Anthropic’s principled stand raised questions about the sincerity of its stated safety commitments.