Following a serious backlash, OpenAI Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman has defended his decision to allow the United States government to use ChatGPT for classified assignments.
Altman faced severe criticism following his announcement of his Pentagon deal last week. His deal with the Pentagon, which Altman admitted looked “opportunistic and sloppy”, came hours after the government's fallout with Anthropic.
Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that Anthropic would be categorised as a ‘supply chain risk'. The term is usually used for non-US companies.
Anthropic, as per media reports, had sought some limits to the government's “full military use” demands for its Artificial Intelligence models, including mass surveillance.
Also Read: US State Department Turns To OpenAI Chatbot As Federal Agencies Retreat From Anthropic
Altman, while talking to his employees, said that the company does not get to make a call about what the Defence Department does with artificial intelligence, while suggesting that the fallout with Anthropic might have been a result of the desire to do so by the company, a Bloomberg report said.
“So maybe you think the Iran strike was good and the Venezuela invasion was bad. You do not get to weigh on that,” Altman told his employees, adding that OpenAI does not “get to make operations decisions” on how its technology is used by the Department of Defence, CNBC quoted Altman as saying.
He said that the Defence Department has made it clear that it does not want the company to tell the government whether certain military actions were a good or a bad idea, even as the department will listen to OpenAI's expertise about the technology's application.
Altman's OpenAI has signed a $200 million agreement with the Pentagon, allowing the agency to use its models for non-classified use cases. The new agreement has also permitted it to deploy the models across classified networks as well.
Pentagon is also talking to Elon Musk's xAI for use across classified use cases. While Altman had “set some conditions” for the Pentagon, he believes xAI will pose no such requests to the Department of Defence and do whatever the agency does.
“I believe we will hopefully have the best models that will encourage the government to be willing to work with us, even if our safety stack annoys them,” Altman was quoted by CNBC as saying. “But there will be at least one other actor, which I assume will be xAI, which effectively will say ‘We'll do whatever you want.”
Meanwhile, a significant number of Americans have cancelled their OpenAI and ChatGPT subscriptions to move to other alternatives. Anthropic's main app has surged to the top of Apple's download charts.
Essential Business Intelligence, Continuous LIVE TV, Sharp Market Insights, Practical Personal Finance Advice and Latest Stories — On NDTV Profit.