IBL News | New York
OpenAI was awarded a $200 million, one-year contract by the U.S. Department of Defense to develop “prototype frontier AI capabilities to address critical national security challenges in both warfighting and enterprise domains.”
The Defense Department specified that the contract is with OpenAI Public Sector LLC.
The new contract represents a small portion of OpenAI’s revenue, which is generating over $10 billion in annualized sales. In March, the company announced a $40 billion financing round at a valuation of $300 billion.
In April, Microsoft, which supplies cloud infrastructure to OpenAI, announced that the U.S. Defense Information Systems Agency had authorized the use of the Azure OpenAI service with classified information.
Also, this year, OpenAI said it would collaborate with defense technology startup Anduril to deploy advanced AI systems for “national security missions.”
Currently, OpenAI is working to build additional AI infrastructure in the U.S. under the $500 billion Stargate project.
In 2024, Anthropic, an OpenAI rival, announced plans to collaborate with Palantir and Amazon to provide its AI models to U.S. defense and intelligence agencies.