{"id":516020,"date":"2026-03-05T13:20:12","date_gmt":"2026-03-05T13:20:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/516020\/"},"modified":"2026-03-05T13:20:12","modified_gmt":"2026-03-05T13:20:12","slug":"sam-altman-admits-openai-cant-control-pentagons-use-of-ai-technology","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/516020\/","title":{"rendered":"Sam Altman admits OpenAI can\u2019t control Pentagon\u2019s use of AI | Technology"},"content":{"rendered":"

OpenAI\u2019s CEO, Sam Altman, told employees on Tuesday that his company does not control how the Pentagon uses their artificial intelligence<\/a> products in military operations. Altman\u2019s claims on OpenAI\u2019s lack of input come amid increased scrutiny of how the military uses AI in war and ethics concerns from AI workers over how their technology will be deployed. <\/p>\n

\u201cYou do not get to make operational decisions,\u201d Altman told employees, according to reports by Bloomberg<\/a> and CNBC<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo maybe you think the Iran strike was good and the Venezuela invasion was bad. You don\u2019t get to weigh in on that,\u201d Altman reportedly said.<\/p>\n

The AI industry has been mired in heated discussions and acrimonious negotiations in recent weeks as the Pentagon has demanded AI companies remove safety guardrails on their models to allow a broader range of military applications. AI-enabled systems have reportedly already been used<\/a> in the US military\u2019s operation to seize Venezuelan leader Nicol\u00e1s Maduro and in targeting decisions in its war against Iran.<\/p>\n

Anthropic, OpenAI\u2019s rival and maker of the Claude chatbot, last week refused a deal with the Pentagon over concerns its model could be used for domestic mass surveillance or fully autonomous weapons. Pete Hegseth, the US defense secretary, declared the company a \u201csupply-chain risk\u201d<\/a> as a result, a designation never used before against a US company and one that could cause significant financial harm if formally enacted.<\/p>\n

On the same day that Hegseth vowed punitive measures against Anthropic, the Pentagon also announced a deal with OpenAI that was seemingly intended to replace the use of Claude in military applications. The timing of the deal and concerns that OpenAI had agreed to cross ethical lines that Anthropic refused led to both public and internal employee backlash<\/a> against OpenAI.<\/p>\n

Altman and OpenAI<\/a> have since tried to insist that its technology will be used legally and conduct damage control, with Altman admitting that the deal was rushed out and made the company look \u201copportunistic and sloppy\u201d.<\/p>\n

Anthropic\u2019s CEO, Dario Amodei, lambasted Altman as \u201cmendacious\u201d in a memo to employees on Wednesday and accused Altman of giving \u201cdictator-style praise to Trump\u201d , the Information<\/a> reported. \u201cWe\u2019ve actually held our red lines with integrity rather than colluding with them to produce \u2018safety theater\u2019 for the benefit of employees (which, I absolutely swear to you, is what literally everyone at [the Pentagon], Palantir, our political consultants, etc, assumed was the problem we were trying to solve),\u201d Amodei reportedly wrote.<\/p>\n

He also took aim at the Pentagon and Donald Trump.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe real reasons [the Pentagon] and the Trump admin do not like us is that we haven\u2019t donated to Trump (while OpenAI\/Greg have donated a lot),\u201d he wrote, referring to Greg Brockman, OpenAI\u2019s president, who gave a Pac supporting Trump $25m in conjunction with his wife.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"OpenAI\u2019s CEO, Sam Altman, told employees on Tuesday that his company does not control how the Pentagon uses…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":516021,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[62,276,277,49,48,61],"class_list":{"0":"post-516020","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-ca","12":"tag-canada","13":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/516020","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=516020"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/516020\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/516021"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=516020"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=516020"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=516020"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}