OpenAI to Sell AI Services to U.S. Government via Amazon Cloud, Replacing Anthropic

OpenAI has signed an agreement to sell access to its AI models to the U.S. Department of Defense and government agencies via Amazon Cloud Services, for handling both classified and unclassified work. Previously, the Pentagon dropped its former supplier Anthropic, as the company refused to allow unrestricted use of its AI for military purposes (such as domestic surveillance and autonomous weapons).

U.S. agencies like the State Department have abandoned Anthropic's Claude model and switched to OpenAI (e.g., StateChat bot now uses GPT-4.1) and Google's models. Anthropic sued the DoD over being labeled a "supply chain risk", claiming the decision is illegal.

OpenAI recently reached a $50 billion investment and multi-year strategic partnership with Amazon, expanding its existing $38 billion AWS agreement to $100 billion over 8 years. AWS will be the exclusive third-party cloud distributor for its enterprise platform Frontier. OpenAI is also in talks with private equity firms for joint ventures to promote its enterprise AI products.