The U.S. National Laboratories will use OpenAI’s most recent artificial intelligence models for scientific research and nuclear weapons security, the company announced Thursday.
Up to 15,000 scientists at the National Laboratories could have access to OpenAI’s reasoning-focused o1 series under the terms of the deal. According to a press statement, OpenAI will also collaborate with Microsoft, its primary investor, to implement one of its models on Venado, the supercomputer located at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Hewlett-Packard Enterprise and Nvidia technologies power Venado.
The collaboration was revealed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman during a Building to Win: AI Economics company event in Washington, D.C.
In the new collaboration, scientists will use OpenAI’s technology to improve cybersecurity to safeguard the U.S. power grid, find novel ways to treat and prevent illnesses, and expand knowledge of basic physics and mathematics, according to OpenAI.
According to the corporation, it will also entail work on nuclear weapons, with an emphasis on lowering the likelihood of nuclear conflict and safeguarding nuclear weapons and supplies globally. A few security-cleared OpenAI researchers will provide project consultation.
OpenAI launched ChatGPT Gov, an AI platform designed especially for use by the US government, earlier this week. According to OpenAI, the new platform is more secure than ChatGPT Enterprise. According to the business, it will enable government organizations to use OpenAI’s models to process sensitive, non-public data while functioning inside their own secure hosting settings.
According to OpenAI, since the start of 2024, over 90,000 federal, state, and municipal government personnel have created over 18 million prompts in ChatGPT. They have used the technology to write and prepare policy memos, translate and summarize documents, develop code, and create applications.
The government collaboration comes after Altman and OpenAI made a number of actions that seem to be aimed at placating President Donald Trump. Altman recently expressed his enthusiasm for the president, attended the ceremony last week with other tech CEOs, and contributed $1 million to the inauguration.
Altman stated on X that he will be fantastic for the nation in many ways and that a closer look at Trump in recent years has truly altered his image in my mind. Additionally, OpenAI is a member of the recently revealed Stargate project, which is investing billions of dollars in AI infrastructure in the United States.
A Chinese competitor is exploding in the United States as OpenAI strengthens its links with the government. This week, the Chinese AI startup lab DeepSeek’s app topped the Apple App Store rankings, and the news that its potent model was trained at a fraction of the price of its American rivals rocked U.S. markets.
Altman called DeepSeek’s R1 model “impressive,” writing on X that “it’s legit invigorating to have a new competitor and that we will obviously deliver much better models!”