OpenAI is launching a new initiative to help democratic oversight bodies develop the expertise and tools they need to understand and oversee government use of AI for national security.

AI is changing how democratic governments protect their people. It can help stop cyberattacks, secure critical infrastructure, detect threats earlier, and give public servants a clearer picture in a crisis. Used well, these tools can strengthen national security.

Democratic oversight helps ensure that uses of public power remain accountable to the people they serve. As AI makes national security work faster and more capable, the institutions responsible for overseeing that work also need to keep pace. AI can act on missing or outdated context, misconfigured objectives, or misaligned assumptions at speed and scale, making mistakes harder to detect manually before they spread. Oversight is especially important in AI use for national security because decisions may necessarily involve secrecy and can have high-stakes consequences.

Guided by our National Security Principles, we approach national security deployments with safeguards, meaningful human judgment, and appropriate oversight, especially in high-stakes settings. Those principles also make it a priority to help the institutions charged with oversight build the capacity to oversee AI use at speed and scale.

Government institutions already have established authorities and responsibilities for overseeing national security activities. When AI contributes to those activities, oversight may need to evolve. Traditional oversight is labor intensive and becomes nearly impossible when small teams using paper-era methods are asked to review systems operating at machine speed.

OpenAI believes more capable systems require stronger oversight, and we apply that principle to ourselves.

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