Strengthening democratic oversight in national security

AI is changing how democratic governments protect their people. It can help stop cyberattacks, secure critical infrastructure, detect threats earlier, and give public servants a clearer picture in a crisis. Used well, these tools can strengthen national security.

Democratic oversight helps ensure that uses of public power remain accountable to the people they serve. As AI makes national security work faster and more capable, the institutions responsible for overseeing that work also need to keep pace. AI can act on missing or outdated context, misconfigured objectives, or misaligned assumptions at speed and scale, making mistakes harder to detect manually before they spread. Oversight is especially important in AI use for national security because decisions may necessarily involve secrecy and can have high-stakes consequences.

Guided by our National Security Principles, we approach national security deployments with safeguards, meaningful human judgment, and appropriate oversight, especially in high-stakes settings. Those principles also make it a priority to help the institutions charged with oversight build the capacity to oversee AI use at speed and scale.

Ensuring oversight keeps pace with AI adoption

Government institutions already have established authorities and responsibilities for overseeing national security activities. When AI contributes to those activities, oversight may need to evolve. Traditional oversight is labor intensive and becomes nearly impossible when small teams using paper-era methods are asked to review systems operating at machine speed.

OpenAI does not perform an oversight role over the government, nor should it. That responsibility rests with elected officials and the public institutions established for the purpose. Rather, we can support oversight institutions with our technology as they carry out their existing mandates.

Three principles will guide this work.