Sam Altman defends OpenAI Pentagon deal after Trump executive order

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on Saturday publicly defended his company’s new Pentagon deal, just a day after President Donald Trump ordered federal agencies to cut ties with rival Anthropic.

Hours after the U.S. and Israel launched a joint strike against Iran, Altman took to X to answer questions about the agreement allowing the Department of War (DoW) to deploy OpenAI’s artificial intelligence (AI) models on its classified network.

“I’d like to answer questions about our work with the DoW and our thinking over the past few days,” he said.

In announcing the agreement late Friday, Altman wrote, “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.”

OPENAI REACHES PENTAGON AGREEMENT AS TRUMP ORDERS ANTHROPIC OFF FEDERAL SYSTEMS

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman defended his company’s Pentagon agreement after President Donald Trump ordered federal agencies to phase out rival Anthropic. (Nathan Howard/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

The OpenAI agreement came as Trump directed every federal agency to stop using Anthropic technology, setting a six-month phase-out period and intensifying the dispute over how AI should be used in military operations.

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth said he was directing the department to designate Anthropic a “supply-chain risk to National Security.”

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei had refused demands from the Pentagon 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 Pentagon accepted OpenAI but not Anthropic, Altman said, “Anthropic seemed more focused on specific prohibitions in the contract, rather than citing applicable laws, which we felt comfortable with.” He added that Anthropic “may have wanted more operational control than we did.”

OPENAI’S $110B FUNDING ROUND DRAWS INVESTMENT FROM AMAZON, NVIDIA, SOFTBANK

President Donald Trump ordered federal agencies to cut ties with Anthropic, intensifying a dispute over military AI use. (Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images)

Altman said the Defense Department did not issue any explicit or implicit threats before the agreement was reached, adding that Pentagon officials were “genuinely surprised we were willing to consider” classified work.

He said OpenAI initially planned to do only non-classified work with the Pentagon, but that talks accelerated this week.

“We thought the DoW clearly needed an AI partner, and doing classified work is clearly much more complex. We have said no to previous deals in classified settings that Anthropic took….