OpenAI, the Microsoft-backed artificial intelligence research company behind the popular AI chatbot ChatGPT, has launched a new venture specifically for use by the U.S. government, it announced Tuesday. 
ChatGPT Gov: A Tool for Government Agencies
Dubbed ChatGPT Gov, the new tool is a tailored version of ChatGPT classic that allows government agencies to access OpenAI's frontier large language models (LLMs) while still utilizing internal safety protocols.
According to OpenAI's announcement, agencies will be able to employ their own hosting environments and security framework while using ChatGPT Gov to handle "non-public sensitive data."
"We believe the U.S. government's adoption of artificial intelligence can boost efficiency and productivity and is crucial for maintaining and enhancing America's global leadership in this technology," OpenAI said in a press release Tuesday. "This includes making our models available to support public sector work that benefits society – such as public health, energy and the environment, transportation and infrastructure, consumer protection, and national security."
Features of ChatGPT Gov
OpenAI said in Tuesday's release that ChatGPT Gov has many of the same features and capabilities as the existing ChatGPT Enterprise. Some of these include:
- Question answering
- Text completion
- Text summarization
- And more
While experts and officials will continue to debate, OpenAI said in its press statement that government agencies using ChatGPT Gov can deploy the program in their own Microsoft Azure commercial cloud or Azure Government cloud on top of Microsoft’s Azure’s OpenAI Service.
It also says that self-hosting ChatGPT Gov allows the agencies to "manage their own security, privacy, and compliance requirements," using cybersecurity frameworks like IL5, CJIS, ITAR, and FedRAMP High. The use of ChatGPT Gov is still subject to OpenAI's usage policies.
According to OpenAI's press statement, Chat GPT services are already used by a few different agencies.
