OpenAI’s GPT-4o gets green light for top secret use in Microsoft’s Azure cloud

Federal agencies with top-secret workloads can now use OpenAI’s GPT-4o through Microsoft’s Azure for U.S. Government Top Secret cloud.

Microsoft announced Thursday it received authorization for 26 additional products in its top-secret cloud environment, meeting Intelligence Community Directive (ICD) 503 standards and allowing agencies — particularly those in the intelligence community and Defense Department — to use them for the government’s most classified information. Those added tools include Azure OpenAI Service — which provides Azure customers access to OpenAI’s generative AI large language models — and Azure Machine Learning, among others.

Douglas Phillips, Microsoft corporate vice president, wrote a blog post announcing the news that Azure OpenAI “allows agencies and authorized partners operating in Microsoft’s Azure Government Top Secret cloud to benefit from multimodal generative AI models, such as GPT-4o, while meeting the rigorous security and compliance requirements necessary for the nation’s most sensitive data. Authorized users can easily access and integrate Azure OpenAI Service and further ground it on their data for more specialized and accurate intelligence.”

GPT-4o is an OpenAI model that can be used for natural language understanding and processing, text summarization and classification, sentiment analysis, question answering, conversational agents and more. It is the foundational model that the popular commercial generative AI tool ChatGPT is built on.

The announcement comes after Azure OpenAI received FedRAMP High authorization last August. 

Last May, William Chappell, Microsoft’s chief technology officer for strategic missions and technologies, told DefenseScoop that the company  had deployed OpenAI’s GPT-4 to an isolated, air-gapped Azure Government Top Secret cloud for use by the Department of Defense for testing. However, the model wasn’t accredited for wider use at the time. The accreditation announced Thursday would now make that possible.

Chappell told DefenseScoop the availability of GPT-4 in the top-secret environment would help DOD officials deal with vast amounts of data.

It’s about “making sure you have the right information at the right time,” he said. “So whether it’s geospatial or any amount of data, we’re swimming in data, we’ve got sensors everywhere. How do you actually make sense of the information that is within your organization? Whether that’s proposals or all sorts of different types of paperwork that we all have to do — how do you simplify and how do you sort through that … data that’s mission focused or data that’s more back office and human resource-focused?”