Microsoft to offer OpenAI GPT models to US government agencies
Jean-Luc Ichard
Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) will provide access to artificial intelligence large language models (LLMs) from ChatGPT creator OpenAI to the users of its Azure Government cloud computing service, which include several U.S. federal agencies.
Microsoft, which backs OpenAI, has added support for the startup's latest model GPT-4, and an earlier version GPT-3 to Azure Government.
It was not disclosed which agencies will use the LLMs. The Defense and Energy departments and NASA are among the federal government customers of Azure Government.
Meanwhile, an official of the Defense Technical Information Center (DTIC) â a unit of Defense Department which focuses on collecting military research â confirmed to Bloomberg News that DTIC would explore the technology.
The initiative marks the first such effort by a major corporation to make the chatbot technology available to the U.S. government.
The company already offers OpenAI models to its commercial customers, with the Azure OpenAI service having 4,500 customers as of May.
Microsoft said in a blog post that Azure Government customers can use GPT-4, GPT-3, and Embeddings for specific task, including but not limited to content generation, summarization, semantic search, and natural language-to-code translation.
However, Azure Government users will not have access to ChatGPT specifically, Bloomberg News reported citing a Microsoft spokesperson. ChatGPT is usually available through the Azure OpenAI service.
Microsoft added only the queries submitted to the Azure OpenAI Service go into the Azure OpenAI model in the commercial environment via an encrypted network and do not remain in the commercial environment. Government data is not used for learning about their data or to train the OpenAI model, the company noted.
Following the release of ChatGPT, Chinese companies including Alibaba (BABA), SenseTime (OTCPK:SNTMF) and Baidu (BIDU) have also launched their own generative AI services. According to a recent study, Chinese organizations have launched 79 LLMs in the past three years in an effort to boost their AI technology capabilities.
In the past few months, AI has been the talk of the town with several companies announcing initiatives to get a piece of the technology. Earlier this June, Nvidia (NVDA) briefly made it to the $1T market cap as the stock rode a wave of investor exuberance surrounding AI.
More on AI Boom

AI Cannot Be Slowed Down - With Ramy Taraboulsi And Kirk Spano
Microsoft: Generative AI Unlocking Growth Potential
AI: Nvidia Is Taking All The Money
Citadel's Ken Griffin thinks near-term generative AI impact is a hype - report