OpenAI Partners with Major Government Contractor to ‘Transform Federal Operations’

According to a Thursday press release, OpenAI has partnered with a major government contractor called Leidos to “deploy artificial intelligence in support of national priorities, including boosting the efficiency and effectiveness of government agencies.” The title of the release describes what Leidos and OpenAI are doing as “deploying AI to transform federal operations.”

With an estimated market capitalization of $24 billion, Leidos is one of those big corporations like Sun Microsystems or Oracle that are clearly beloved by the powers that be despite not having much in the way of, or explicitly wanting to, a public-facing brand.

The new arrangement between Leidos and OpenAI focuses on integrating OpenAI’s products into federal government workflows around national security, defense, infrastructure and more. “Leidos and OpenAI are harnessing the transformative power of AI to help improve the way federal agencies operate,” Ted Tanner, CTO of Leidos, said in the company’s press release.

Leidos is deeply embedded in the federal government, and is involved in things like procurement and logistics, apparently navigating all the confusing legacy software systems that trapped budget cutters in DOGE during the DOGE craze last year.

But Leidos in particular was easily discounted amid DOGE’s budget cuts, with DOGE announcing in February last year that it had cut $1 billion of Leidos contracts, and then going just kidding and resetting the value of the canceled contract to $560,000. A spokesman for Leidos, Brandon Ver Velde, told the Times the following month, “We strongly support the goal of creating a dramatically more efficient and effective federal government that costs taxpayers less money.”

The company has a “strong relationship with DHS,” according to a 2023 statement from Roy Stevens, president of what Leidos calls the “Homeland Sector.” According to Stevens, Leidos’s roles at the time included cross-agency intelligence sharing and supporting secure collaboration for federal and civilian agencies “in the interest of helping DHS fulfill its mission of homeland security.”

Before this Leidos partnership, there was already an OpenAI product called OpenAI for Government. In the OpenAI blog post announcing OpenAI for Government, OpenAI indicated that it had won a contract with the Pentagon “with a limit of $200 million”. Prior to that contract, OpenAI had government contracts at “US National Labs, Air Force Research Laboratory, NASA, NIH, and Treasury”.

Gizmodo contacted OpenAI for comment about Leidos’ work with the Department of Homeland Security – given that it is the umbrella organization of the controversial agencies Homeland Security Investigations, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) (which includes the Border Patrol), and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). We’ll update if we hear back.