OpenAI offers year of free ChatGPT to service members, veterans

U.S. service members transitioning out of the military will now be able to access ChatGPT Plus for a year under a new offer from OpenAI that’s aimed at helping them with their job hunt.

The new offer, announced Monday ahead of Veterans Day, is available to service members who are within 12 months of separation or retirement, and any veteran within their first year of leaving service.  

“The goal here is pretty simple,” Katrina Mulligan, OpenAI for Government’s head of national security partnerships, said on a call with reporters ahead of the announcement. “We know that nearly 70% of veterans say finding employment is their biggest challenge, and we want to make that transition a little bit easier by providing support that’s available anytime.”

Mulligan said the idea for the offer started with OpenAI’s own veteran employees who used the platform for their own career navigation. “They urged us to make these tools available to others going through the same experience, and we were really glad to support it,” she said.

Through the new offer, eligible service members and veterans are able to access ChatGPT Plus — which is typically a $20 per month subscription, and boasts faster response time as well as priority access to new features — as well as some personalized content for veterans. That includes a “getting started” video targeted toward veterans, and over 100 example chats that Mulligan said were developed by veterans based on real tasks during a transition.

The offer is not a direct partnership with the U.S. government via the Department of Veterans Affairs or Department of Defense — which the Trump administration calls the Department of War — but such collaboration isn’t out of the question

“We look forward to partnering with the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Department of War as we work to implement it,” a spokesperson told FedScoop in a written statement.

To verify eligibility, OpenAI said it was partnering with customer verification platform SheerID.

According to the VA’s Transition Assistance Program, roughly 200,000 service members transition out of the military every year. While there is massive federal investment in programs to help veterans transition — $13 billion according to a 2024 RAND Corp. report — there are still gaps with the transition process. That same RAND report found that few programs are targeted toward helping veterans translate their skills to meet the needs of civilian jobs.

Paul M. Nakasone, a retired U.S. Army general who sits on OpenAI’s board of directors, however, highlighted the transition support provided by the government. He said the U.S. has generally done well in helping veterans translate their skills, citing the GI Bill and programs available after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as examples. Nakasone said that assistance needs to continue. 

“In a world today, where artificial intelligence really is the driving factor of how we do our economies, it’s so important that our veterans have this ability to leverage the ideas and the insights that our platform can provide,” Nakasone said.

Vikki Lampton, an OpenAI employee and Army veteran who pushed for the initiative, told reporters that the idea started with how much she personally relied on ChatGPT to organize and brainstorm. 

Then, Lampton said she began mentoring other veterans to use it to do things like “translate their military experience into civilian terms,” “understand their benefits,” “demystify their paperwork, prepare for interviews” and even “explore starting their own businesses.”

“What stood out was how quickly they picked it up and how much more confident they felt once they had something that helped them navigate the transition on their own terms,” Lampton said.

That’s why she and a colleague, Troy Peterson, pushed for the initiative.

“For many of us who have served, transition can be a daunting phase,” Peterson said. Veterans have skills and experience but not always the tools to explain them or plan these next steps to unstuck. We hope this program can help reduce some of those obstacles for veterans and make the transition a successful step forward.”