Our agreement with the Department of War

Update on March 2, 2026 

Throughout our discussions, the Department made clear it shares our commitment to ensuring our tools will not be used for domestic surveillance. To make our principles as clear as possible, we worked together to add additional language to our agreement. 

This language makes explicit that our tools will not be used to conduct domestic surveillance of U.S. persons, including through the procurement or use of commercially acquired personal or identifiable information. The Department also affirmed that our services will not be used by Department of War intelligence agencies like the NSA. Any services to those agencies would require a new agreement. 

The new language reads:

• Consistent with applicable laws, including the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution, National Security Act of 1947, FISA Act of 1978, the AI system shall not be intentionally used for domestic surveillance of U.S. persons and nationals.

• For the avoidance of doubt, the Department understands this limitation to prohibit deliberate tracking, surveillance, or monitoring of U.S. persons or nationals, including through the procurement or use of commercially acquired personal or identifiable information.

The Department of War plans to convene a working group made up of leaders from the frontier AI labs, cloud providers, and the Department’s policy and operational communities. OpenAI will participate and expect this will be an important forum for ongoing dialogue on emerging AI capabilities, privacy, and national security challenges going forward. 

These updates build on the framework we announced last week and we hope will help create a pathway for other labs to work with the Department going forward.

Yesterday we reached an agreement with the Pentagon for deploying advanced AI systems in classified environments, which we requested they also make available to all AI companies.

Our agreement includes:

2. Our contract. Here is the relevant language:

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