OpenAI is amending its hastily arranged deal to supply artificial intelligence to the US Department of War (DoW) after the ChatGPT owner\u2019s chief executive admitted it looked \u201copportunistic and sloppy\u201d.<\/p>\n
The contract prompted fears the San Francisco startup\u2019s AI could be used for domestic mass surveillance but its boss, Sam Altman, said on Monday night the startup would explicitly bar its technology from being used for that purpose or being deployed by defence department intelligence agencies such as the National Security Agency (NSA).<\/p>\n
OpenAI, which has more than 900 million users of ChatGPT, made the deal almost immediately after the Pentagon\u2019s existing AI contractor, Anthropic, was dropped.<\/p>\n
Anthropic had insisted \u201cusing these systems for mass domestic surveillance is incompatible with democratic values\u201d, leading the US president, Donald Trump, to call Anthropic \u201cleftwing nut jobs\u201d and directing the federal government to stop using its technology.<\/p>\n
Despite denials from OpenAI that the agreement allowed for surveillance use, commentators raised the spectre of the Snowden scandal<\/a>, which broke in 2013, when it emerged the NSA was engaged in mass harvesting of phone and internet communications.<\/p>\n The deal prompted an online backlash against OpenAI, with users of X and Reddit encouraging a \u201cdelete ChatGPT\u201d campaign. One post read<\/a>: \u201cYou\u2019re now training a war machine. Let\u2019s see proof of cancellation.\u201d<\/p>\n Claude, the chatbot made by Anthropic, jumped to the top of Apple\u2019s App Store charts, rising above ChatGPT, according to analysis by Sensor Tower.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \u201cWe shouldn\u2019t have rushed to get this out on Friday,\u201d Altman wrote. \u201cThe 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.\u201d<\/p>\n Upon announcing the deal, OpenAI had said the contract had \u201cmore guardrails than any previous agreement for classified AI deployments, including Anthropic\u2019s\u201d.<\/p>\n However, the use of AI by the US military has alarmed nearly 900 employees at OpenAI and Google, also a leading power in the technology, who have signed an open letter<\/a> calling on their bosses to refuse to let the DoW use their products for surveillance and autonomous killing.<\/p>\n Warning that the US government was trying to \u201cdivide each company with fear that the other will give in\u201d, they wrote: \u201cWe hope our leaders will put aside their differences and stand together to continue to refuse the DoW\u2019s current demands for permission to use our models for domestic mass surveillance and autonomously killing people without human oversight.\u201d<\/p>\n