Sam Altman and the Pentagon: how military contracts could become insurance for OpenAI

Sam Altman and the Pentagon: how military contracts could become insurance for OpenAI

The OpenAI-Pentagon alliance in this column is described not as a typical defense contract, but as strategic insurance for Sam Altman's business. If a model becomes part of the U.S. military infrastructure, the company gains not just revenue, but near-immunity from ordinary market rules.

Why OpenAI Needs the Pentagon

The author begins with OpenAI's economics: AI infrastructure expenses have already reached levels difficult to offset with subscriptions alone. The text cites estimates of more than $10 billion in quarterly expenses, gross margins around 41%, and strong dependence on Microsoft's cloud infrastructure. Against this backdrop, the question is no longer about growth, but about who can finance scaling if the market begins to doubt the profitability of large language models.

The column links this logic to CFO Sarah Friar's statement about "government insurance" for OpenAI's infrastructure obligations. The words were later softened, but the author interprets them as a signal: private capital may not be enough, and the best customer for such expensive technology is a state that thinks in terms of national security, not quarterly profits. Hence the main conclusion of the first section: OpenAI's growth trajectory is too expensive to rely solely on the ordinary market.

Military Contract as Shield

Next, the text turns to the story of Anthropic and the Pentagon. According to the author, after the conflict over Claude's limitations, American military quickly began reorienting toward OpenAI. For this column, this is a pivotal turn: the Pentagon needs AI not as an experiment, but as a working tool for analysis, planning, and other sensitive tasks. This means a supplier ready to integrate into this loop gains special status—even if publicly it speaks about rights, freedoms, and restraining principles.

"We remain committed to serving all of humanity in the best way we know how."

The author sees in such statements not a refutation of risks, but political packaging of the deal. His thesis is simple: if OpenAI enters the closed networks and processes of the U.S. Department of Defense, the company becomes too important for the state to allow it to collapse. In this construction, the Pentagon is no longer just a major client, but a client of last resort that effectively reduces OpenAI's threat of bankruptcy, investor pressure, and strict scrutiny of profitability.

How the Market Changes

From this, the author draws a broader conclusion: military partnership changes competition in the industry more than the release of yet another model. While other players fight for commercial clients and count compute costs, OpenAI can gain resource circuits unavailable to ordinary startups. This is not only about money, but also about position within the state system, where a technology supplier begins to influence strategic decisions. By the logic of the column, such a position gives OpenAI several advantages at once:

• long-term demand that does not depend on subscription numbers
• access to sensitive use cases and closed data
• political weight that cannot be bought with ordinary marketing
• protection from part of market pressure and demands for quick profitability

Hence the harshest thesis of the text: the question "who has the best AI" may quickly yield to the question "who is built into state infrastructure." The author links this to Peter Thiel's approach, for whom real business power begins where ordinary competition ends. But in this same logic, he sees a risk for Altman himself: entry into high politics provides protection today, but makes the company dependent on changes of power, public sentiment, and future conflicts over military applications of AI.

What This Means

This column is important not only as criticism of OpenAI, but also as an early signal of a new stage in the AI market: the struggle is no longer simply for models and users, but for the status of national security infrastructure. If such a scenario takes hold, the winners will not necessarily be the most efficient companies, but those who manage to turn the state into their primary client and primary insurer.