Our approach to government and national security partnerships

Governments are beginning to use frontier AI systems for increasingly important work, including in national security. That creates new imperatives for AI labs, governments, and civil society to work together on how these tools should be used in sensitive settings. 

We believe democratic societies should be able to use AI to protect people, defend critical infrastructure, deliver public services, and respond to emerging threats, including in areas like cyber defense and biological security where AI can meaningfully advantage defenders. But increasingly capable AI systems must be deployed in ways that reinforce democratic accountability, meaningful human judgment, and the rule of law, and that strengthen democratic institutions rather than concentrate power.

Today we are publishing OpenAI’s National Security Principles to offer transparency into how we approach government partnerships and national security uses of our technology.

These principles reflect a cross-company effort to develop a more comprehensive approach to our work in the national security and law enforcement area as our technology continues to advance. We engaged a leading national security expert, David Kris, to help facilitate the process and provide his independent judgment, held listening sessions across the company, and engaged employees representing a range of teams from research and safety to policy and government partnerships.

We are publishing them now as we expand our work with the U.S. government and allied partners in critical defensive areas, particularly cyber and biosecurity. In the past month, as part of our Daybreak⁠ cyber defense program, we have already established Trusted Access for Cyber partnerships with Australia, Canada, Japan, Republic of Korea, France, Germany, Poland, the Netherlands and EU institutions like ENISA. We also have a growing and trusted partnership with the UK government around cyber, testing and evaluation. We are taking a similar approach in biosecurity. Last month, we also announced expanded trusted access to our GPT‑Rosalind model for select U.S. government and allied partners supporting public health and biodefense missions.

These principles apply to our current and future national security and law enforcement partnerships, including our existing work with the Department of War. When we announced our agreement earlier this year, we articulated several contractual restrictions: no use of OpenAI technology for mass domestic surveillance, no use of OpenAI technology to direct autonomous weapons systems, and no use of OpenAI technology for high-stakes automated decisions. Those restrictions are consistent with the principles we are sharing today.

We believe the right thing to do is to be clear about how our technology can and cannot be used, and to be transparent about them. But many of the most consequential questions about AI in government, especially in national security, should be answered through the democratic process. The role of companies like ours is to help inform those decisions, not make them alone. That is why we support legislative efforts to establish safeguards around some of the highest-risk military uses of AI, including in the contexts of domestic surveillance, autonomous weapons systems, and other high-risk uses that directly affect U.S. national security.

Read the principles here⁠(opens in a new window).