OpenAI Signs Agreement to Deploy o-Series Models for U.S. National Labs

OpenAI has signed an agreement with the U.S. National Laboratories to give roughly 15,000 government scientists access to its latest reasoning models, in a deal that places the company's technology inside some of the most sensitive research institutions in the American government.

Under the agreement, OpenAI will work with Microsoft to deploy o1 or another o-series model on Venado, an NVIDIA supercomputer at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). Venado will serve as a shared resource for researchers from Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore, and Sandia National Labs. The system was built specifically to drive scientific breakthroughs in materials science, renewable energy, astrophysics, and related fields.

The stakes are considerable. The National Laboratories lead the U.S. government's nuclear security program, which focuses on reducing the risk of nuclear war and securing nuclear materials and weapons worldwide. OpenAI framed that mission as a core motivation for the deal.

"This use case is highly consequential, and we believe it is critical for OpenAI to support it as part of our commitment to national security," the company said in its announcement.

OpenAI said the partnership will include "careful and selective review of use cases and consultations on AI safety from OpenAI researchers with security clearances." That detail matters: it signals that OpenAI staff with clearances will advise on how frontier models are applied to weapons-adjacent research, an arrangement that few AI companies can replicate.

The company listed six priority applications for the deployment: accelerating basic science that underpins U.S. technological leadership; identifying new approaches to treating and preventing disease; enhancing cybersecurity and protecting the American power grid; unlocking natural resources and overhauling energy infrastructure; improving detection of natural and man-made threats, including biological and cyber, before they emerge; and deepening research into fundamental mathematics and high-energy physics.

OpenAI cast the deal as a continuation of a long-standing pattern. The U.S. government has historically partnered with private industry, the company noted, to convert technological innovation into concrete gains in healthcare, energy, and other critical fields. The agreement also reflects what OpenAI describes as its commitment to "empowering leading developers to safely leverage our models — transforming data into intelligence and intelligence into solutions, breakthroughs and discoveries."

The company positioned the partnership in explicitly geopolitical terms. "As advanced AI continues to reshape global geopolitics, this partnership provides a critical opportunity for OpenAI to help guide that transformation," it said.

The deal builds on an earlier collaboration between OpenAI and Los Alamos National Laboratory, in which the two worked with wet labs to assess the risks that advanced models pose in creating bioweapons, including human-designed pandemics. OpenAI said it expects the new engagement to expand into broader safety collaborations across chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear (CBRN) risks.

Microsoft's role is structural. OpenAI described the company as its "preferred partner for AI compute infrastructure" and said the two firms intend to build on the National Labs experience to develop future projects supporting the U.S. government. Microsoft has managed computing for the Energy Department's labs for years, which makes it the natural bridge between OpenAI's models and classified government infrastructure.

OpenAI tied the agreement to its founding mission, saying that sharing its technology with the nation's top scientists "aligns with our mission of ensuring AGI benefits humanity" and that the U.S. government is "a critical partner to achieve this goal."

The announcement closes a circle for OpenAI on safety research. The same reasoning capabilities now headed for Venado were previously tested at Los Alamos for their potential misuse. Now the models will run on the lab's own supercomputer, serving both scientific discovery and threat detection.

OpenAI called the agreement "the beginning of a new era, where AI will advance science, strengthen national security, and support U.S. government initiatives." The company credited the leadership of the National Labs, government officials, and Microsoft for making the arrangement possible.