OpenAI has recently secured custom AI deals with the Indian government, the Pentagon, and Grab, signaling a significant expansion of its services and a growing focus on tailored AI solutions for diverse sectors. These agreements highlight the increasing demand for advanced AI technologies and OpenAI's strategic move to cater to specific needs across government, defense, and commercial industries.

Indian Government

OpenAI has partnered with the Indian government's IndiaAI Mission to launch the OpenAI Academy in India. This collaboration, formalized through a memorandum of understanding (MoU), aims to broaden access to AI learning for various groups across the country, including students, educators, civil servants, and small business owners. The OpenAI Academy will provide AI training content through its platform and the IndiaAI FutureSkills portal, with programs available in English, Hindi, and four regional languages. This marks OpenAI's first international rollout of its education platform.

The partnership includes several initiatives, such as OpenAI contributing educational content to the IndiaAI Mission's FutureSkills platform to support digital skilling and hosting the content on the iGOT Karmayogi platform to train government officials. OpenAI will also conduct webinars and workshops in six cities and provide API credits to IndiaAI-approved fellows and startups. Additionally, a series of hackathons across seven states will engage students, with winners invited to OpenAI Dev Day events.

OpenAI is also considering collaborating with India under its 'OpenAI for Countries' initiative to build data center capacity in coordination with the U.S. government. This initiative aims to assist national governments in leveraging AI for economic growth and innovation.

Pentagon

OpenAI has secured a $200 million contract with the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) to develop prototype artificial intelligence capabilities for national security challenges. This agreement, executed under OpenAI's "OpenAI for Government" initiative, tasks OpenAI with developing "frontier AI" systems for both warfighting and enterprise domains. The project will primarily be conducted in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area and is slated for completion by July 2026.

The AI tools developed under this contract will address critical national security challenges, including improving healthcare for service members and their families, streamlining program and acquisition data analysis, and supporting proactive cyber defense. OpenAI's involvement will be limited to non-combat functions, focusing on administrative tasks, logistics, and cyber defense. The company will offer custom models for national security on a limited basis, ensuring all use cases comply with OpenAI's usage policies and guidelines.

Grab

OpenAI is collaborating with Grab, a leading superapp in Southeast Asia, to build and deploy advanced AI solutions that enhance the Grab experience for users, partners, and employees. This collaboration, the first of its kind for OpenAI in the region, focuses on three key areas: accessibility, customer support, and mapping.

Grab aims to leverage OpenAI's text and voice capabilities to make its services more accessible to visually impaired or elderly users. The company also plans to use AI technology to build customer support chatbots that better understand and resolve user problems. Additionally, Grab will utilize OpenAI's vision capabilities to enhance its map-making efforts through automation and higher-quality data extraction from visual images.

Grab intends to deploy ChatGPT Enterprise among select employees to improve productivity. This will provide employees with enterprise-grade security and privacy, unlimited high-speed GPT-4 access, and advanced data analysis capabilities. In April 2025, Grab introduced AI-driven tools like the AI Merchant Assistant and AI Driver Companion, developed in collaboration with OpenAI and Anthropic, to provide operational insights and improve the accuracy of GrabMaps.