Welcome to DU!
The truly grassroots left-of-center political community where regular people, not algorithms, drive the discussions and set the standards.
Join the community:
Create a free account
Support DU (and get rid of ads!):
Become a Star Member
Latest Breaking News
Editorials & Other Articles
General Discussion
The DU Lounge
All Forums
Issue Forums
Culture Forums
Alliance Forums
Region Forums
Support Forums
Help & Search
A senior State Dept official has made it clear Sam Altman of OpenAI agreed to a Pentagon deal Anthropic refused
So much for Altman pretending he was in agreement with Anthropic's Dario Amodei.
From Jeremy Lewin, Under Secretary of State for Foreign Assistance, Humanitarian Affairs & Religious Freedom, on X:
Senior Official Jeremy Lewin
@UnderSecretaryF
For the avoidance of doubt, the OpenAI - @DeptofWar contract flows from the touchstone of “all lawful use” that DoW has rightfully insisted upon & xAI agreed to. But as Sam explained, it references certain existing legal authorities and includes certain mutually agreed upon safety mechanisms. This, again, is a compromise that Anthropic was offered, and rejected.
Even if the substantive issues are the same there is a huge difference between (1) memorializing specific safety concerns by reference to particular legal and policy authorities, which are products of our constitutional and political system, and (2) insisting upon a set of prudential constraints subject to the interpretation of a private company and CEO. As we have been saying, the question is fundamental—who decides these weighty questions? Approach (1), accepted by OAI, references laws and thus appropriately vests those questions in our democratic system. Approach (2) unacceptably vests those questions in a single unaccountable CEO who would usurp sovereign control of our most sensitive systems.
It is a great day for both America’s national security and AI leadership that two of our leading labs, OAI and xAI have reached the patriotic and correct answer here 🇺🇸
Last edited
9:57 PM · Feb 27, 2026
You'd have to be a MAGA idiot to believe that any Trump appointee in the current regime, or Elon Musk, is truly patriotic.
They work for a mob boss, Trump. They have no respect for the law and the Constutution.
And now Sam Altman has joined them. (Or appears to have. You can never know if Altman has any loyalties except to himself.)
As has been pointed out elsewhere - see replies 6 & 7 at https://www.democraticunderground.com/10143623171 - the wording Amodei refused and Altman agreed to does not require a human in the loop before an AI-controlled weapon takes action. The wording is "human responsibility for the use of force" which can mean responsibility taken afterward. (Not that the Trump regime or Trump personally ever takes responsibility for any failures or harm done, but they might look for scapegoats and then absolve them if the regime has any further use for them.) And Altman is fine with the government's definitions of what mass surveillance is allowed, while Amodei had correctly pointed out that our current laws do not take into account just how dangerous AI surveillance is.
I've already seen people online saying that as much as they like some of OpenAI's AI tools, they will now get those off their computers because they consider OpenAI too compromised.
3 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
