OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, told employees on Tuesday that his company does not control how the Pentagon uses their artificial intelligence products in military operations. Altman’s claims on OpenAI’s lack of input come amid increased scrutiny of how the military uses AI in war and ethics concerns from AI workers over how their technology will be deployed.
“You do not get to make operational decisions,” Altman told employees, according to reports by Bloomberg and CNBC.
“So maybe you think the Iran strike was good and the Venezuela invasion was bad. You don’t get to weigh in on that,” Altman reportedly said.
The AI industry has been mired in heated discussions and acrimonious negotiations in recent weeks as the Pentagon has demanded AI companies remove safety guardrails on their models to allow a broader range of military applications. AI-enabled systems have reportedly already been used in the US military’s operation to seize Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro and in targeting decisions in its war against Iran.
Anthropic, OpenAI’s rival and maker of the Claude chatbot, last week refused a deal with the Pentagon over concerns its model could be used for domestic mass surveillance or fully autonomous weapons. Pete Hegseth, the US defense secretary, declared the company a “supply-chain risk” as a result, a designation never used before against a US company and one that could cause significant financial harm if formally enacted.
On the same day that Hegseth vowed punitive measures against Anthropic, the Pentagon also announced a deal with OpenAI that was seemingly intended to replace the use of Claude in military applications. The timing of the deal and concerns that OpenAI had agreed to cross ethical lines that Anthropic refused led to both public and internal employee backlash against OpenAI.
Altman and OpenAI have since tried to insist that its technology will be used legally and conduct damage control, with Altman admitting that the deal was rushed out and made the company look “opportunistic and sloppy”.
Anthropic’s CEO, Dario Amodei, lambasted Altman as “mendacious” in a memo to employees on Wednesday and accused Altman of giving “dictator-style praise to Trump” , the Information reported. “We’ve actually held our red lines with integrity rather than colluding with them to produce ‘safety theater’ for the benefit of employees (which, I absolutely swear to you, is what literally everyone at [the Pentagon], Palantir, our political consultants, etc, assumed was the problem we were trying to solve),” Amodei reportedly wrote.
He also took aim at the Pentagon and Donald Trump.
“The real reasons [the Pentagon] and the Trump admin do not like us is that we haven’t donated to Trump (while OpenAI/Greg have donated a lot),” he wrote, referring to Greg Brockman, OpenAI’s president, who gave a Pac supporting Trump $25m in conjunction with his wife.
