San Francisco, California - OpenAI said Friday it struck a deal for the Pentagon to use its models in the US military's classified network, with "safeguards," after President Donald Trump blacklisted AI rival Anthropic.

OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman confirmed the agreement in an X post on Friday. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth reposted the statement, as did senior Pentagon official Emil Michael.

Earlier on Friday, the dispute between the Defense Department and Anthropic escalated when Hegseth designated the company a supply chain risk to national security, barring US military contractors and partners from doing business with Anthropic with immediate effect.

The company's CEO Dario Amodei has insisted that its AI tools cannot be used for mass surveillance in the US or in fully autonomous weapons, although he did not object to its applications in large-scale warfare and surveillance of foreign countries and populations.

Altman said two of OpenAI's core safety principles "are prohibitions on domestic mass surveillance and human responsibility for the use of force, including for autonomous weapon systems."

He said the Defense Department "agrees with these principles, reflects them in law and policy, and we put them into our agreement," but further details were not disclosed.

Altman called on the Pentagon to offer the same conditions to all AI firms, saying such terms should be acceptable to any company, and added OpenAI would build technical safeguards to ensure its models behave as intended.

AI has become an integral component in military operations, with Anthropic's Claude reportedly used in the US abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and other models employed in Israel's genocidal assault on Gaza.