Kamal Ghorui
OpenAI has signed a new agreement to sell access to its AI models to US defence and government agencies through Amazon Web Services (AWS), covering both classified and unclassified operations. The deal marks an escalation in the ChatGPT-maker’s ambitions in the government sector even as its rival Anthropic has been declared supply chain risk.Anthropic, whose Claude models have been used multiple times by the Pentagon, worked alongside Palantir and AWS to deploy its models in classified military and intelligence systems. In July 2025, it won a Pentagon contract worth up to $200 million.But that relationship developed cracks in February when Anthropic refused to allow unrestricted military use of its AI in use cases involving domestic surveillance and autonomous weapons. The Pentagon labelled Anthropic a “supply chain risk”, effectively shutting it out of government work entirely. That left a gap. OpenAI moved quickly to fill it.
What OpenAI’s deal involves
According to Reuters, OpenAI had previously limited its government work to unclassified use cases but now, the company has secured a Pentagon contract that extends its reach into classified operations, and its new partnership with AWS is the infrastructure backbone that makes it possible.Notably, AWS is already deeply embedded in US federal systems, making it a natural channel for OpenAI to reach defence and intelligence customers at scale.Moreover, Amazon and OpenAI announced partnership last month wherein the cloud provides will co-create a Stateful Runtime Environment powered by OpenAI models, available on Amazon Bedrock for AWS customers to build generative AI applications and agents at production scale. Other key highlights of the last month’s deal include:
- AWS will be the exclusive third-party cloud distribution provider for OpenAI Frontier, which enables organizations to build, deploy, and manage teams of AI agents.
- OpenAI to consume 2 gigawatts of Trainium capacity through AWS infrastructure to support demand for Stateful Runtime Environment, Frontier, and other advanced workloads.
- OpenAI and Amazon will develop customized models available to power Amazon’s customer-facing applications.
- Amazon will invest $50 billion in OpenAI.
