Altman said no to military AI abuses – then signed Pentagon deal anyway

Opinion A week ago today, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said he'd draw the same lines as Anthropic. By that night, he'd signed a Department of Defense deal that included no such AI protections. What's going on here?

We live in interesting times in AI land. First, the Trump administration's self-proclaimed "Department of War" (DoW) Secretary Pete Hegseth demanded AI giant Anthropic include contract language that would give the military the right to use Anthropic's LLMs for "any lawful use." Anthropic had already dropped its Responsible Scaling Policy clause, saying it wouldn't train AI models that it couldn't guarantee were safe, but that wasn't enough. Hegseth wanted to be able to use Anthropic's Claude for domestic mass surveillance and AI-controlled weapons. When Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei wouldn't agree, Hegseth and Trump stripped the company of all its government contracts.

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