A top OpenAI executive has quit the company over its agreement with the Department of Defense that allows its tech to be deployed across the military.
The employee, Caitlin Kalinowski, who led OpenAI’s hardware and robotics efforts, announced her resignation on social media Saturday.
“This wasn’t an easy call. AI has an important role in national security,” wrote Kalinowski in a tweet. “But surveillance of Americans without judicial oversight and lethal autonomy without human authorization are lines that deserved more deliberation than they got.”
“This was about principle, not people,” she added, insisting she still has “deep respect” for CEO Sam Altman.
Last month, OpenAI announced a new deal with the Pentagon amid its rival Anthropic facing threats from top Trump officials for not coming to a similar agreement. Talks had fallen apart between Anthropic and the Pentagon because, according to CEO Dario Amodei, the company insisted on prohibiting its AI systems being used in the mass surveillance of US citizens and autonomous weaponry without humans in the loop. When it became clear Anthropic wouldn’t budge, the Pentagon cut off the company and made good on its threat to declare it a “supply chain risk,” which prohibits it from signing any military contracts.
This spiralled into a public relations disaster for OpenAI, with many criticizing Altman for playing ball with a deeply unpopular and bellicose administration. Originally, OpenAI had agreed that its AI systems could be used for “all lawful purposes,” and it was only after heated backlash that Altman said he would update the Pentagon deal to include specific protections on surveillance and autonomous weaponry.
In short, OpenAI looked like it was selling out while Anthropic made out like heroes. The news sparked a mass exodus of users from OpenAI’s ChatGPT to Anthropic’s Claude, with the Claude app usurping ChatGPT from the top of the App Store.
Dissent came within the industry, too. Over 1,000 former and current workers from OpenAI and Google have signed an open letter demanding their employers to refuse the Pentagon’s demands to use AI tech for mass surveillance and autonomous weaponry.
Kalinowski, explaining her departure, said that her “issue is that the announcement was rushed without the guardrails defined.”
“It’s a governance concern first and foremost,” she elaborated in a follow-up post. “These are too important for deals or announcements to be rushed.”
Altman himself admitted that the deal was “rushed” and that its “optics don’t look good.”
In a statement provided to media outlets, OpenAI emphasized its updated agreement with the Pentagon and its clear red lines: “no domestic surveillance and no autonomous weapons.”
“We recognize that people have strong views about these issues and we will continue to engage in discussion with employees, government, civil society and communities around the world,” the company added.
Kalinowski’s departure and the broader uproar over OpenAI’s military agreement comes as concerns over AI’s use in warfare, and especially in decisions that could claim human lives, are more exigent than ever. Despite Anthropic’s public resistance to the DoD, reports suggest that Claude was used to select targets for the US’s deadly missile strikes in Iran. Though unconfirmed, it remains a chilling possibility that one of those identified targets was a girl’s school in Minab, where at least 168 people, most of them children, were horrifically killed by an airstrike that was likely a US Tomahawk missile.
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