OpenAI and NORAD team up to bring new magic to “NORAD Tracks Santa”
OpenAI
OpenAI and NORAD are teaming up again this year for NORAD Tracks Santa, adding three ChatGPT-powered holiday tools. Now families can generate elves, coloring pages, and custom Christmas stories, not just watch a dot move across a map.
Based on reporting by OpenAI — read the original for the full story.
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NORAD Tracks Santa has been a December ritual since the Cold War, when a wrong number at a Colorado Springs command post supposedly turned into a tradition of tracking Santa's sleigh on radar. This year the program gets an AI upgrade. OpenAI has built three ChatGPT tools into the mix, letting kids and parents generate their own festive elves, printable toy coloring pages, and personalized Christmas stories rather than just refreshing a map on December 24th.
The pitch is simple: turn a passive tracking website into something families actually make things with. Type a few details about your kid, get back a bedtime story with them in it. Want a coloring page shaped like a specific toy? Ask for it. The elf generator leans into the same idea, spitting out a custom character instead of a generic clip-art Buddy the Elf knockoff.
What's notable here isn't the technology itself, ChatGPT generating short stories and images is old news by now, but the partner. NORAD is about as buttoned-up an institution as exists, a joint US-Canadian military command built to watch for airborne threats. Lending its decades-old Santa-tracking brand to an AI company's product demo says something about how normalized generative AI tools have become, even in contexts that used to be strictly analog and government-issued.
OpenAI, for its part, gets a wholesome, low-stakes showcase during a season when AI headlines otherwise skew toward deepfakes, job displacement, and copyright lawsuits. A kid asking ChatGPT to write a story about Santa visiting their house is about as far from those controversies as the technology gets, and that's presumably the point.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is OpenAI doing what every consumer tech company does before Christmas: find the most harmless, feel-good use case possible and slap a partnership label on it. Fine by me, honestly, better a personalized Santa story than another round of AI-hype earnings calls, but let's not pretend NORAD lending its brand to a chatbot demo is some meaningful signal about AI's societal readiness. It's marketing, wrapped in tinsel.
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