OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced on Friday his company reached an “agreement” with the Department of War to deploy its models in their classified network. “In all of our interactions, the DoW displayed a deep respect for safety and a desire to partner to achieve the best possible outcome. 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,” Altman said. “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,” Altman continued. “We remain committed to serve all of humanity as best we can. The world is a complicated, messy, and sometimes dangerous place,” he added. Tonight, we reached an agreement with the Department of War to deploy our models in their classified network. In all of our interactions, the DoW displayed a deep respect for safety and a desire to partner to achieve the best possible outcome. AI safety and wide distribution of… — Sam Altman (@sama) February 28, 2026 Fox Business explained further: The deal came after Trump directed every federal agency to stop using Anthropic technology, escalating a standoff over how artificial intelligence should be used in military operations. In a Truth Social post, Trump said agencies, including the Department of War, would have a six-month phase-out period. “Anthropic better get their act together, and be helpful during this phase out period, or I will use the Full Power of the Presidency to make them comply, with major civil and criminal consequences to follow,” he wrote. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth later said he was directing the department to designate Anthropic a “supply-chain risk to National Security.” “Effective immediately, no contractor, supplier, or partner that does business with the United States military may conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic,” he added. “Anthropic will continue to provide the Department of War its services for a period of no more than six months to allow for a seamless transition to a better and more patriotic service.” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei had refused earlier demands from the Department of War to allow its AI to be used for “all lawful purposes,” citing concerns about “mass domestic surveillance” and “fully autonomous weapons.” “Anthropic understands that the Department of War, not private companies, makes military decisions. We have never raised objections to particular military operations nor attempted to limit use of our technology in an ad hoc manner. However, in a narrow set of cases, we believe AI can undermine, rather than defend, democratic values. Some uses are also simply outside the bounds of what today’s technology can safely and reliably do. Two such use cases have never been included in our contracts with the Department of War, and we believe they should not be included now,” Amodei said in a lengthy statement after the fallout. Anthropic CEO Releases Statement After Fallout With Department Of War "We think our deployment has more guardrails than any previous agreement for classified AI deployments, including Anthropic's," OpenAI stated. Yesterday we reached an agreement with the Department of War for deploying advanced AI systems in classified environments, which we requested they make available to all AI companies. We think our deployment has more guardrails than any previous agreement for classified AI… — OpenAI (@OpenAI) February 28, 2026 Fortune noted: Sasha Baker, head of national security policy at OpenAI, and Katrina Mulligan, who leads national security for OpenAI for Government, also spoke at the OpenAI all-hands, according to the source. One of those officials said the relationship between Anthropic and the government had broken down because Anthropic cofounder and CEO Dario Amodei had offended Department of War leadership, including publishing blog posts that “the department got upset about.” Anthropic, a company founded by people who left OpenAI over safety issues, had been the only large commercial AI maker whose models were approved for use at the Pentagon, in a deployment done through a partnership with Palantir. But Anthropic’s management and the Pentagon have been locked for several days in a dispute over limitations that Anthropic wanted to put on the use of its technology. Those limitations are essentially the same ones that Altman said the Pentagon would abide by if it used OpenAI’s technology.