How OpenAI caved to the Pentagon on AI surveillance
Summary
OpenAI negotiated with the Pentagon to use its AI systems for military purposes, while Anthropic refused and was blacklisted for rejecting two uses: domestic mass surveillance (monitoring Americans without individual consent) and lethal autonomous weapons (AI systems that can kill targets without a human making the final decision). OpenAI's CEO claimed to have found a way to maintain safety limits in the company's military contract, though the article does not detail what those specific terms are.
Classification
Affected Vendors
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Original source: https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/887309/openai-anthropic-dod-military-pentagon-contract-sam-altman-hegseth
First tracked: March 2, 2026 at 11:00 AM
Classified by LLM (prompt v3) · confidence: 92%