Sam Altman responds to the US War Department's choice of OpenAI over Anthropic: Disagreements may stem from demands for operational control.

On March 1st, PANews reported that OpenAI founder Sam Altman responded to the recent collaboration with the U.S. Department of War during an AMA on the X platform. He disclosed that Anthropic and the U.S. Department of War were once "very close to reaching an agreement," and both sides had a strong desire to cooperate for most of the negotiations. However, the highly tense negotiation environment could quickly deteriorate, which may be one of the important reasons why the deal ultimately failed to materialize. Regarding security concepts, OpenAI adopts a "layered approach," including building a security technology stack, deploying Frontier Deployment Engineers (FDEs), involving security researchers in the project, delivering through cloud deployment, and directly collaborating with the U.S. Department of War. Compared to setting specific prohibitions in the contract, Anthropic seems to focus more on explicit contractual restrictions, while OpenAI tends to rely more on applicable legal frameworks and uses technical security measures as the core guarantee. However, other companies may have different positions on this. Anthropic may have hoped to gain more operational control in the collaboration, which may also be one of the reasons for the divergence in their approaches.