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Title: OpenAI Amends Pentagon Deal As Sam Altman Admits It Looks 'Sloppy'

Link: https://yro.slashdot.org/story/26/03/03/19182...

OpenAI is amending its Pentagon contract after CEO Sam Altman acknowledged it
appeared "opportunistic and sloppy." On Monday night, Altman said the company
would explicitly restrict its technology from being used by intelligence
agencies and for mass domestic surveillance. The Guardian reports: OpenAI,
which has more than 900 million users of ChatGPT, made the deal almost
immediately after the Pentagon's existing AI contractor, Anthropic, was
dropped. [...] The deal prompted an online backlash against OpenAI, with
users of X and Reddit encouraging a "delete ChatGPT" campaign. One post read:
"You're now training a war machine. Let's see proof of cancellation." In a
message to employees reposted on X, the OpenAI CEO said the original deal
announced on Friday had been struck too quickly after Anthropic was dropped.
"We shouldn't have rushed to get this out on Friday," Altman wrote. "The
issues are super complex, and demand clear communication. We were genuinely
trying to de-escalate things and avoid a much worse outcome, but I think it
just looked opportunistic and sloppy." Upon announcing the deal, OpenAI had
said the contract had "more guardrails than any previous agreement for
classified AI deployments, including Anthropic's." [...] However, observers
including OpenAI's former head of policy research, Miles Brundage, have
queried how OpenAI has managed to secure a deal that assuages ethical
concerns Anthropic believed were insurmountable. Posting on X, he wrote:
"OpenAI employees' default assumption here should unfortunately be that
OpenAI caved + framed it as not caving, and screwed Anthropic while framing
it as helping them." Brundage added: "To be clear, OAI is a complex org, and
I think many people involved in this worked hard for what they consider a
fair outcome. Some others I do not trust at all, particularly as it relates
to dealings with government and politics." In his X post, he also wrote that
he would "rather go to jail" than follow an unconstitutional order from the
government. "We want to work through democratic processes," Brundage wrote.
"It should be the government making the key decisions about society. We want
to have a voice, and a seat at the table where we can share our expertise,
and to fight for principles of liberty."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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