OpenAI‘s CEO, Sam Altman, has admitted that the announcement of his company’s deal with the Pentagon was hastily made and poorly communicated.
In a series of posts on X, late Monday, Altman confessed that the company’s communication regarding the Pentagon deal was rushed and “wrong”. He emphasized that the complexities of the issues demanded clear communication, which was missing in this case.
Here is re-post of an internal post:
We have been working with the DoW to make some additions in our agreement to make our principles very clear.
1. We are going to amend our deal to add this language, in addition to everything else:
Altman elaborated that the aim was to de-escalate the situation and avoid a worse outcome. “I think it just looked opportunistic and sloppy,” wrote the CEO.
Regarding the specifics of OpenAI’s contract with the U.S. government, Altman emphasized two core safety safeguards: a prohibition on domestic mass surveillance and a mandate for human accountability in the use of force, including decisions involving autonomous weapons systems.
The Monday’s post, which also served as an internal memo to the employees, stated that the company intends to revise its government deal to include new language. Altman also plans to host an All Hands meeting on Tuesday to answer further questions.
Sam Altman previously said the U.S. government was mistaken in labeling Anthropic a supply-chain risk, adding late Monday that he hopes the Pentagon extends to the company the same terms his firm has agreed to.
OpenAI Deal Amid Employee Uproar
The OpenAI-Pentagon deal came into the spotlight on Friday, just hours after the Trump administration formally blacklisted rival Anthropic for sticking to guardrails for its AI tool usage.
The deal was announced on the heels of employees of both OpenAI and Alphabet's Google (NASDAQ:GOOGL) (NASDAQ:GOOG), writing an open letter demanding clear boundaries or "red lines" in government contracts.
Meanwhile, the controversy surrounding the Pentagon deal and the subsequent ban on Anthropic led to a massive surge in users on Anthropic's Claude AI platform on Monday, causing it to crash repeatedly.
Disclaimer: This content was partially produced with the help of AI tools and was reviewed and published by Benzinga editors.
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