Elyse Betters Picaro / ZDNET
OpenAI maintains several government-facing initiatives, including testing partnerships with the National Labs and ChatGPT Gov. Last week, the company announced it is rolling them all under a single umbrella initiative: OpenAI for Government.
(Disclosure: Ziff Davis, ZDNET's parent company, filed an April 2025 lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.)
Pilot program with the DOD
The initiative's first priority will be a pilot program with the US Department of Defense (DOD), capped at $200 million, to "identify and prototype how frontier AI can transform [DOD] administrative operations, from improving how service members and their families get health care, to streamlining how they look at program and acquisition data, to supporting proactive cyber defense," OpenAI's announcement states.
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The company added that all use cases in the contract must comply with OpenAI policies and guidelines.
In April 2024, Microsoft reportedly pitched DALL-E to the Department of Defense as a battlefield training tool, which sparked debate over OpenAI's usage policies. Since its founding, OpenAI's policies page had stated its models should not be used for military development, but in January 2024 the company removed "military" and "warfare" from the usage language.
The page now forbids using the service "to harm yourself or others," including "develop or use weapons, injure others or destroy property."
By naming use cases ranging from administration to cyber defense, the announcement keeps a certain amount of flexibility -- and, to some degree, opacity -- in how OpenAI's tech will be used in practice.
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