Our agreement with the Department of War

Our agreement with the Department of War | OpenAI

February 28, 2026

Our agreement with the Department of War

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Update on March 2, 2026

Throughout our discussions, the Department made clear it shares our commitment to ensuring our tools will not be used for domestic surveillance. To make our principles as clear as possible, we worked together to add additional language to our agreement.

This language makes explicit that our tools will not be used to conduct domestic surveillance of U.S. persons, including through the procurement or use of commercially acquired personal or identifiable information. The Department also affirmed that our services will not be used by Department of War intelligence agencies like the NSA. Any services to those agencies would require a new agreement.

The new language reads:

• Consistent with applicable laws, including the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution, National Security Act of 1947, FISA Act of 1978, the AI system shall not be intentionally used for domestic surveillance of U.S. persons and nationals.
• For the avoidance of doubt, the Department understands this limitation to prohibit deliberate tracking, surveillance, or monitoring of U.S. persons or nationals, including through the procurement or use of commercially acquired personal or identifiable information.

The Department of War plans to convene a working group made up of leaders from the frontier AI labs, cloud providers, and the Department’s policy and operational communities. OpenAI will participate and expect this will be an important forum for ongoing dialogue on emerging AI capabilities, privacy, and national security challenges going forward.

These updates build on the framework we announced last week and we hope will help create a pathway for other labs to work with the Department going forward.

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Yesterday we reached an agreement with the Pentagon for deploying advanced AI systems in classified environments, which we requested they also make available to all AI companies.

We think our agreement has more guardrails than any previous agreement for classified AI deployments, including Anthropic’s. Here’s why.

We have three main red lines that guide our work with the DoW, which are generally shared by several other frontier labs:

• No use of OpenAI technology for mass domestic surveillance.
• No use of OpenAI technology to direct autonomous weapons systems.
• No use of OpenAI technology for high-stakes automated decisions (e.g. systems such as “social credit”).

Other AI labs have reduced or removed their safety guardrails and relied primarily on usage policies as their primary safeguards in national security deployments. We think our approach better protects against unacceptable use.

In our agreement, we protect our red lines through a more expansive, multi-layered approach. We retain full discretion over our safety stack, we deploy via cloud, cleared OpenAI personnel are in the loop, and we have strong contractual protections. This is all in addition to the strong existing protections in U.S. law.

We believe strongly in democracy. Given the importance of this technology, we believe that the only good path forward requires deep collaboration between AI efforts and the democratic process. We also believe our technology is going to introduce new risks in the world, and we want the people defending the United States to have the best tools.

Our agreement includes:

1. Deployment architecture. This is a cloud-only deployment, with a safety stack that we run that includes these principles and others. We are not providing the DoW with “guardrails off” or non-safety trained models, nor are we deploying our models on edge devices (where there could be a possibility of usage for autonomous lethal weapons).

Our deployment architecture will enable us to independently verify that these red lines are not crossed, including running and updating classifiers.

2. Our contract. Here is the relevant language:

The Department of War may use the AI System for all lawful purposes, consistent with applicable law, operational requirements, and well-established safety and oversight protocols. The AI System will not be used to independently direct autonomous weapons in any case where law, regulation, or Department policy requires human control, nor will it be used to assume other high-stakes decisions that require approval by a human decisionmaker under the same authorities. Per DoD Directive 3000.09 (dtd 25 January 2023), any use of AI in autonomous and semi-autonomous systems must undergo rigorous verification, validation, and testing to ensure they perform as intended in realistic environments before deployment.

For intelligence activities, any handling of private information will comply with the Fourth Amendment, the National Security Act of 1947 and the Foreign Intelligence and Surveillance Act of 1978, Executive Order 12333, and applicable DoD directives requiring a defined foreign intelligence purpose. The AI System shall not be used for unconstrained monitoring of U.S. persons’ private information as consistent with these authorities. The system shall also not be used for domestic law-enforcement activities except as permitted by the Posse Comitatus Act and other applicable law.

3. AI expert involvement. We will have cleared forward-deployed OpenAI engineers helping the government, with cleared safety and alignment researchers in the loop.

FAQ

Why are you doing this?

First, we think the US military absolutely needs strong AI models to support their mission especially in the face of growing threats from potential adversaries who are increasingly integrating AI technologies into their systems. We originally did not jump into a contract for classified deployment, as we did not feel that our safeguards and systems were ready, and have been working hard to ensure that a classified deployment can happen with safeguards to ensure that red lines are not crossed.

We were—and remain—unwilling to remove key technical safeguards to enhance performance on national security work. That is not the correct approach to supporting the US military.

Second, we also wanted to de-escalate things between DoW and the US AI labs. A good future is going to require real and deep collaboration between the government and the AI labs. As part of our deal here, we asked that the same terms be made available to all AI labs, and specifically that the government would try…