OpenAI senior executive resigns over Pentagon deal

OpenAI’s top robotics executive, Caitlin Kalinowski, said on Saturday that she had resigned over the artificial intelligence giant’s deal with the US government to allow its technology’s deployment for war and domestic surveillance.

The company behind ChatGPT secured a defence contract with the Pentagon last month, hours after rival Anthropic refused to agree to unconditional military use of their technology.

OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman later posted to X, saying the startup would be modifying a contract so its models would not be used for “domestic surveillance of US persons and nationals,” after criticism that it was giving too much power to military officials without oversight.

Kalinowski said she cared deeply about “the Robotics team and the work we built together,” but that “surveillance of Americans without judicial oversight and lethal autonomy without human authorisation are lines that deserved more deliberation than they got.”

“This was about principle, not people,” she wrote in a post on X.

Kalinowski wrote in a follow-up post that she took issue with the haste of OpenAI’s Pentagon deal.

“To be clear, my issue is that the announcement was rushed without the guardrails defined,” she wrote.

“It’s a governance concern first and foremost. These are too important for deals or announcements to be rushed.”

Anthropic’s refusal to authorise use of its Claude AI models had prompted backlash from US officials.

Kalinowski previously worked at Meta, developing their augmented reality glasses.

AFP