If a first contract with the Pentagon wasn’t enough, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman now wants to provide services to NATO. However, he’s facing backlash from his own employees.
Altman is under immense pressure from his team following another bid to sign a military contract with NATO.
In an all-hands meeting with Altman and his team, he announced that OpenAI is looking into a contract to deploy its technology across all NATO-classified networks, according to the Wall Street Journal.
However, Altman apparently misspoke, according to an OpenAI spokesperson, who told the WSJ the NATO deal would involve unclassified networks only.
Cybernews has contacted OpenAI for comment.
This comes after OpenAI signed a deal with the US Department of War (DoW), which outraged various AI researchers at the company.
The deal was announced quickly, and Altman himself suggested that the haste with which this announcement was delivered didn’t match the importance of the agreement.
Altman said via X that the team “shouldn’t have rushed to get this out” as the issues at hand are “super complex” and “demand clear communication.”
The OpenAI CEO copped to it almost immediately, saying the announcement looked “opportunistic and sloppy” from the perspective of his workforce and the public.
The announcement prompted backlash, forcing the AI company to backtrack and change the terms of the agreement.
OpenAI amended its announcement in an attempt to reassure skeptics, saying that “the Department made clear it shares our commitment to ensuring our tools will not be used for domestic surveillance.”
“This language makes explicit that our tools will not be used to conduct domestic surveillance of US persons, including through the procurement or use of commercially acquired personal or identifiable information,” OpenAI said in an updated statement.
The DoW has also guaranteed that OpenAI’s services will not be used by intelligence agencies like the National Security Agency (NSA), and any services to these agencies would require a fresh agreement.
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Yet this did little to reassure the public, as reportedly 2.5 million people have pledged to stop using ChatGPT or have cancelled their subscription, according to the QuitGPT website.
Users, including public figures like Katy Perry, have subscribed to Anthropic’s Claude, cancelled their ChatGPT subscription, and urged others to ditch OpenAI’s services.
The democracy activists behind the movement claim that after Anthropic rejected the DoW, Altman “swooped in and accepted the Pentagon’s corrupt deal.”
As a result of Anthropic’s refusal, the DoW declared the company a “supply chain risk,” and President Donald Trump banned Anthropic’s tech from use in the federal government.
In the OpenAI meeting, the tech CEO said that the days following the Pentagon deal have been far from pleasant.
“To try so hard to do the right thing and get so absolutely like, personally crushed for it – and I know this is happening to all of you too, so I feel terrible for subjecting you all to this – is really painful,” as per the WSJ.
“I think this was an example of a complex but right decision with extremely difficult brand consequences and very negative PR for us in the short term,” Altman lamented.
To add insult to injury, Altman told his employees that OpenAI doesn’t have the right to choose how the US military will use its technology.
“So maybe you think the Iran strike was good and the Venezuela invasion was bad…you don’t get to weigh in on that,” said Altman, according to a meeting transcript reviewed by CNBC.
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