OpenAI has partnered with AWS to sell access to its AI models to U.S. defense and government agencies for both classified and unclassified work, building on a Pentagon contract the company secured in late February. The deal effectively positions OpenAI as the replacement for Anthropic, which lost its Pentagon contract worth up to $200M after refusing to allow unrestricted military use of its AI for domestic surveillance and autonomous weapons. The partnership comes after OpenAI updated its agreement with Microsoft last fall to allow it to sell AI to national security customers through rival cloud providers, making government contracts an increasingly important battleground for major AI labs.
