It didn’t take long for OpenAI to make its next big announcement following the disruptive change that the DeepSeek chatbot has been causing. However, if you’re expecting a smarter or faster ChatGPT, that isn’t what OpenAI has planned for now.
In a blog post, the company revealed ChatGPT Gov, a new version of ChatGPT that government agencies can deploy in their own Microsoft Azure commercial or government cloud environment.
Via OpenAI’s CPO Kevin Weil: “Enabling the public sector, especially the US Federal government, to leverage ChatGPT is critical to maintain America’s global leadership in AI. We see enormous potential for these tools to support the public sector in tackling complex challenges—from improving public health and infrastructure to strengthening national security.”
OpenAI says self-hosting ChatGPT Gov enables agencies to more easily manage their own security, privacy, and compliance requirements, such as stringent cybersecurity frameworks (IL5, CJIS, ITAR, FedRAMP High). In addition, it might expedite internal authorization of OpenAI’s tools for handling non-public sensitive data.
ChatGPT Gov includes access to many of the same features and capabilities of ChatGPT Enterprise, which OpenAI enumerated for any interested parties:
- Saving and sharing conversations within their government workspace and uploading text and image files.
- GPT-4o excelling in text interpretation, summarization, coding, image interpretation, and mathematics.
- Custom GPTs that employees can build and share within their government workspace.
- An administrative console for CIOs and IT teams to manage users, groups, Custom GPTs, single sign-on (SSO), and more.
OpenAI even shared some ways local government agencies are already using ChatGPT, such as improving access to internal resources, basic coding, supporting AI education efforts, advancing scientific research, translation services for multilingual communities, and more.
Wrap up
This announcement comes a few hours after OpenAI’s Sam Altam responded to the DeepSeek hype. Currently, new users can’t sign up for DeepSeek, as it’s limiting registrations and blaming mysterious cyberattacks.
While the startup founder has been called an “AI hero” in China after the US stock market tanked, there’s now a discussion to potentially ban the app in the United States, as it collects tons of data about users and sends it all to China.
BGR will continue following the latest breakthrough announcements on AI and will let you know as we learn more about how the government might use ChatGPT to leverage its initiatives.
