Sam Altman faced ‘serious questions’ in DC meeting OpenAI defense work

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman met with a handful of lawmakers in Washington, D.C. where Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Ariz., said he raised some “serious questions” about the company’s approach to warfare and its recent deal with the Department of Defense.

In an interview with CNBC’s Emily Wilkins, Kelly said the group talked “in detail” about surveillance and how artificial intelligence systems could be used within a kill chain. He called it a “good discussion.”

“There’s got to be guardrails in place, and we’ve got to make sure that we’re always thinking about the Constitution and making sure that we comply with it,” Kelly said.

OpenAI formed a deal with the DOD late last month just hours after rival Anthropic had been blacklisted by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who declared the company a “Supply-Chain Risk to National Security.”

Anthropic had been trying to renegotiate its contract with the DOD, but the talks stalled over a disagreement about how the technology could be used. The DOD wanted Anthropic to grant the military unfettered access to its models for all lawful purposes, while Anthropic sought assurance that its models would not be used for fully autonomous weapons or domestic mass surveillance.

Altman said in a post on X the day the deal fell apart that prohibitions on domestic mass surveillance and human responsibility for the use of force, including for autonomous weapon systems, are two of the company’s “most important safety principles.” He said the DOD agreed and put them into the arrangement.

OpenAI published an excerpt of its contract with the DOD, which says that the agency “may use the AI System for all lawful purposes.” The company said it’s confident the DOD will not be able to use its AI systems for mass surveillance or fully autonomous weapons because of OpenAI’s safety stack, the contract language and existing laws.

“We think it’s very important to support the United States government and the democratic process,” Altman told CNBC on Thursday. He added that while OpenAI disagrees with the Pentagon’s decision to designate Anthropic a supply chain risk, he thinks the government needs to be able to make decisions about “how the most important things in the country are going to work.”

The clash between Anthropic and the DOD came as a shock to officials and technologists in Washington. Many had come to view Anthropic’s models as superior — they were the first to be deployed in the agency’s classified networks — and championed the company’s ability to integrate with existing defense contractors like Palantir. 

Kelly told CNBC that Congress “needs to have a role.”

“We need to have legislation on this that creates some of these boundaries, guardrails,” he said. “This is the United States Congress, things don’t move as fast as we would like, but this technology is moving very quickly.”

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