Sam Altman tells staff at an all-hands that OpenAI is negotiating a deal with the Pentagon, after Trump orders the end of Anthropic contracts

Sam Altman told OpenAI employees at an all-hands meeting on Friday afternoon that a potential agreement is emerging with the U.S. Department of War to use the startup’s AI models and tools, according to a source present at the meeting and a summary of the meeting seen by Fortune. The contract has not yet been signed.

The meeting came at the end of a week where a conflict between Secretary of War Pete Hegseth and OpenAI rival Anthropic burst into public acrimony, ending with the apparent end of Anthropic’s contracts with the Pentagon and with the federal government in general.

Altman said the government is willing to let OpenAI build their own “safety stack”—that is, the layered system of technical, policy, and human controls that sit between a powerful AI model and real-world use—and that if the model refuses to do a task, then the government would not force OpenAI to make it do that task.

OpenAI would retain control over how technical safeguards are implemented, which models are deployed and where, and would limit deployment to cloud environments rather than “edge systems.” (In a military context, edge systems are a category that could include aircraft and drones.) In........

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