OpenAI has begun offering a version of ChatGPT designed for US government agencies. ChatGPT Gov includes many of the same features found in the Enterprise offering of the chatbot, including access to the company’s GPT-4o model. “By making our products available to the US government, we aim to ensure AI serves the national interest and the public good, aligned with democratic values, while empowering policymakers to responsibly integrate these capabilities to deliver better services to the American people,” OpenAI said in a blog post published Tuesday.
Before today, US government employees were already using ChatGPT in their day-to-day work. According to the company, federal, state and local government workers at 3,500 agencies across the country have sent more than 18 million messages since 2024. With today’s announcement, those same agencies can now self-host ChatGPT within their own Microsoft Azure commercial or government cloud environment. In practice, that should make it easier for government IT heads to ensure the tool is used safely.
OpenAI’s move to offer ChatGPT Gov comes after the company announced it was partnering with SoftBank to build $500 billion worth of AI infrastructure within the United States over the next four years. Many immediately questioned whether OpenAI had the money to fund Stargate to the level it said it would. After the announcement, The Information reported that SoftBank and OpenAI would each commit about $19 billion to the project to start, far less than the $100 billion the two had said they would deploy “immediately.”
More broadly, the arrival of ChatGPT Gov comes amid uncertainty about the strength of the American AI industry. On Monday, US tech stocks dropped dramatically after DeepSeek, an AI assistant from a Chinese startup, unseated ChatGPT as the top free app in the App Store over the weekend. DeepSeek purportedly spent less than $6 million to develop its R1 model.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/openai-debuts-a-version-of-chatgpt-for-us-government-agencies-162809443.html?src=rss
