On Friday evening, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman revealed that the company has finalized a deal permitting the Department of Defense to implement its AI models within the department’s secure network.

This development follows a prominent confrontation between the DoD — referred to as the Department of War during the Trump era — and OpenAI’s competitor Anthropic. The Pentagon urged AI companies, including Anthropic, to allow their models to be utilized for “all lawful purposes,” while Anthropic aimed to establish a boundary concerning mass surveillance and entirely autonomous weapons.

In an extensive statement issued on Thursday, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei asserted that the organization “never objected to specific military operations nor attempted to restrict usage of our technology in an ad hoc way,” but maintained that “in a limited number of instances, we believe AI can compromise, rather than uphold, democratic ideals.”

This week, over 60 OpenAI employees alongside 300 employees from Google endorsed an open letter urging their companies to back Anthropic’s stance.

Following the unsuccessful negotiations between Anthropic and the Pentagon, President Donald Trump condemned the “Leftwing nut jobs at Anthropic” in a social media update that also instructed federal agencies to cease utilizing the company’s products after a six-month wind-down period.

In another post, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth alleged that Anthropic was attempting to “usurp veto authority over the operational choices of the United States military.” Hegseth further stated that he is categorizing Anthropic as a supply-chain risk: “Effective immediately, no contractor, supplier, or partner engaging with the United States military may perform any commercial operations with Anthropic.”

On Friday, Anthropic stated it had “not yet received direct communication from the Department of War or the White House regarding the status of our negotiations,” but emphasized it would “contest any supply chain risk designation legally.”

Unexpectedly, Altman mentioned in a post on X that OpenAI’s new defense contract includes safeguards that address the same concerns that became contentious for Anthropic.

“Two of our key safety principles are bans on domestic mass surveillance and human accountability for the use of force, including for autonomous weapon systems,” Altman stated. “The DoW concurs with these principles, manifests them in law and policy, and we incorporated them into our agreement.”

Altman noted that OpenAI “will establish technical safeguards to ensure our models function correctly, which the DoW also required,” and it will assign engineers to the Pentagon “to assist with our models and to ensure their safety.”

“We are urging the DoW to extend these same conditions to all AI companies, which we believe should be acceptable for everyone,” Altman added. “We have conveyed our strong wish to see a reduction in legal and governmental confrontations, moving towards reasonable solutions.”

Fortune’s Sharon Goldman reports that Altman informed OpenAI staff during an all-hands meeting that the government would permit the company to develop its own “safety stack” to avert misuse and that “if the model declines to perform a task, then the government would not compel OpenAI to execute that task.”

Altman’s post was published just before it was revealed that the U.S. and Israeli governments have commenced bombing Iran, with Trump advocating for the ousting of the Iranian administration.