According to a press release from Thursday, OpenAI has just 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 headline of the release described what Leidos and OpenAI are doing as “deploying AI to transform federal operations.”
With an estimated market cap 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—or apparently wanting—much in the way of a public-facing brand.
The new arrangement between Leidos and OpenAI is focused on integrating OpenAI’s products into federal government workflows around national security, defense, infrastructure, and others. Ted Tanner, the CTO of Leidos said in the company’s press release, “Leidos and OpenAI are harnessing the transformative power of AI to help improve how federal agencies operate.”
Leidos is deeply embedded in the federal government, and involved in things like procurement and logistics, apparently navigating all the confusing legacy software systems that famously ensnared the budget cutters at DOGE last year during the DOGE frenzy.
But Leidos in particular got off easy amid the DOGE budget cuts, with DOGE announcing in February of last year that it had cut a Leidos contract worth $1 billion, and then going just kidding and reassessing the value of the cancelled contract at $560,000. A Leidos spokesman, 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.”
According to a 2023 statement from Roy Stevens, president of what Leidos calls it’s “Homeland Sector,” the company has a “strong relationship with DHS.” Leidos’ roles at the time included, according to Stevens, “supporting cross-agency intelligence sharing and secure collaboration for federal and civilian agencies,” in the interest of helping “DHS accomplish their mission of safeguarding the homeland.”
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 $200 million ceiling.” Prior to that contract, OpenAI had government contracts across “U.S. National Labs, the Air Force Research Laboratory, NASA, NIH, and the Treasury.”
Gizmodo reached out to OpenAI for comment about Leidos’ work with the Department of Homeland Security—noting that it is the umbrella organization of the controversial agencies Homeland Security Investigations, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) (which includes Border Patrol), and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). We will update if we hear back.
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