OpenAI has been facing a wave of backlash for its deal with the Pentagon with critics expressing concerns about the company’s technology being used for autonomous weapons or mass surveillance. CEO Sam Altman announced the agreement, which gave the Pentagon access to its AI models on Feb. 28, shortly after rival Anthropic rejected a similar deal.
The deal was criticized by several OpenAI employees, including Caitlin Kalinowski, who cited it as her reason for resigning from the company. Kalinowski, who joined OpenAI from Meta in 2024 to oversee hardware in its robotics division, said via a post on X, “AI has an important role in national security. But surveillance of Americans without judicial oversight and lethal autonomy without human authorization are lines that deserved more deliberation than they got.”
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An OpenAI spokesperson defended the deal saying “We believe our agreement with the Pentagon creates a workable path for responsible national security uses of AI while making clear our 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.”
Many other employees also criticized the deal. “I personally don’t think this deal was worth it,” Aidan McLaughlin, a research scientist at OpenAI, wrote on X.
Another employee told CNN that many of them “really respect” rival Anthropic for refusing the Pentagon’s deal. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei had said his company wouldn’t agree to anything without assurances that the technology wouldn’t be used to power autonomous weapons or mass domestic surveillance.
“We cannot in good conscience accede to their request,” Amodei said at the time. Altman moved to amend his deal in face of criticism, but that wasn’t enough to counter the backlash. In an internal memo sent on March 2 and later shared on X, Altman said that OpenAI had revised the contract to include clearer safeguards preventing the Pentagon from using its models for mass domestic surveillance.
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Uninstalls of ChatGPT spiked by more than 295% on Feb. 28, the day after the deal was announced. Anthropic’s Claude, on the other hand, gained many new users. By Monday, Claude ranked No. 1 among the most downloaded free apps on the U.S. Apple App Store. It remained in the top spot as of Saturday. Claude is also now at the top of the list of most-downloaded productivity apps on the App Store. ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini are close behind, as is xAI’s Grok.
OpenAI also saw protests, with activists gathering outside its Mission Bay headquarters in San Francisco on Tuesday, calling for a “QuitGPT” movement.
OpenAI is also reportedly considering a contract to deploy its artificial intelligence technology on the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO) “unclassified” networks. This potential agreement came about days after the Pentagon deal.