OpenAI CEO Sam Altman became a guest of dishonor at an after-Oscars bash last Sunday, after being viciously confronted about his company’s deal with the so-called Department of War, Page Six reports.
The party, hosted by Vanity Fair, was attended by A-listers like Michael B. Jordan, Timothée Chalamet, and other celebrities including Kylie Jenner, Teyana Taylor, and Zoe Saldaña.
Why Altman, a tech guy, was invited in the first place is an open question, though we’d wager it has something to do with how he’s openly been trying to court Hollywood executives for years now, even angling to break into the motion picture industry himself by backing an AI-animated feature film.
At least one famous attendee wasn’t happy to see Altman showing his face: the lauded playwright and screenwriter Jeremy O. Harris. Harris, who won a Tony Award for “Slave Play” and co-wrote the indie film “Zola,” reportedly made a bee-line for Altman and accused him of being the “[Joseph] Goebbels of the Trump administration” for his deal with the Pentagon.
Altman responded calmly, sources told Page Six..
Goebbels, as you may well know, was the Nazi’s regime’s minister of propaganda under Adolf Hitler. What does that have to do with Altman? In an email to Page Six, Harris apologized — for comparing Altman to the wrong Nazi collaborator.
“It was late and I had a few too many martinis so I misspoke when I said Goebbels… I should’ve said Friedrich Flick,” Harris stated.
Flick was an uber-rich German industrialist who became the Nazi regime’s biggest supplier with his business empire spanning iron, steel, coal, cars, chemicals, aircraft, and arms. At the Nuremberg Trials, he was found guilty of war crimes; his trial focused on his use of Russian slave labor at his businesses during the war.
In Harris’s view, Altman is similarly colluding with a war-mongering government. In late February, OpenAI sparked outrage after announcing a new deal with the Department of Defense to deploy its AI systems across the military. Hardly a day passed after Altman’s announcement when the Trump administration ordered a barrage of deadly airstrikes in Iran that killed its supreme leader Ali Khamenei — and, to date, upwards of 1,000 civilians.
Making Altman look even worse was that OpenAI’s rival Anthropic had refused to cut a deal with the military to give it unrestricted access to its AI, despite weighty threats from the administration that included a government seizure of its tech. The backlash was so widespread that Anthropic’s Claude replaced OpenAI’s ChatGPT at the top of the app store, protests raged outside the former company’s headquarters, and hundreds of its employees signed an open letter demanding their employer refuse to the Pentagon’s demands for unfettered access to its AI systems.
In the week that followed, Altman went into full damage control mode; he publicly apologized for the Pentagon deal being “rushed,” and behind the scenes, he defended his decision on collaborating with the military at an all-hands meeting. He also updated the agreement to emphasize the redlines Anthropic had insisted on before negotiations fell through: a restriction against using AI in autonomous weaponry without humans in the loop and in the mass surveillance of US citizens.
The fallout of Altman’s military deal isn’t over yet, evidently. A top OpenAI executive, Caitlin Kalinowski, quit the company in protest of Altman’s rushed deal, which she criticized for not defining key guardrails around its AI tech.
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