OpenAI has faced opposition from time to time over the years. But its CEO Sam Altman on Friday announced a new deal with the Defense Department to expand how its AI systems will be deployed in the military, sparking a reaction more intense than the company has ever seen before.
A large number of loyal ChatGPT users announced they were shipping off the cloud, whose creator, Anthropic, had apparently refused to cut a deal with the Pentagon that gives it unrestricted access to its AI systems — even despite government threats to seize the company’s technology. The cloud quickly rose to the top of the app store and dethroned OpenAI’s chatbot. Uninstalls of the ChatGPT app increased by nearly 300 percent.
Now, some are riding the wave of anti-OpenAI sentiment to broadly criticize the company. On Tuesday, about fifty protesters from the “QuitGPT” movement demonstrated outside OpenAI’s headquarters in San Francisco, denouncing everything from the potential of its AI to disrupt jobs to harm the environment.
“AI is taking water from communities, polluting communities and it’s also increasing the electricity bills of communities,” said Perrin Millekin, a protester. told business insider. “They’re not even paying for it – we are.”
Others expressed more philosophical criticisms.
Megan Mattson, who denies using any AI, explained, “As soon as I saw it start to appear in the visuals and imagery, I can see exactly where it’s going.” BI. “It destroys journalism, it destroys the arts, it destroys the expression of our common humanity.”
Even the technical staff were present. “I never go to protests. This is new to me,” said a 26-year-old Oakland tech worker who wore a cardboard robot mask told san francisco standard. “We’re not generally political people. We’re technocrats, you know – we want to build stuff. What OpenAI is doing in terms of building legal mass surveillance technology for the government… is, frankly, crazy.”
Across the pond, hundreds more workers gathered at King’s Cross in LondonA tech hub of OpenAI, Meta and the UK headquarters of Google DeepMind convened on Saturday to voice similar criticisms of the AI industry.
Altman is clearly alarmed by the widespread outrage. The day after the DoD deal was announced he hosted a rare AMA on
By Monday, he was in full damage control mode. In a lengthy and apologetic statement, Altman claimed that OpenAI is now changing the terms of its Pentagon deal to explicitly prohibit the use of its AI systems to conduct surveillance on American citizens, demonstrating the degree of people-pleasing typically seen in its sycophantic chatbots. Such a ban was one of the red lines over which Anthropic reportedly fell out with the Pentagon. But Altman made no mention of Anthropic’s other key guarantee in his apology statement: that AI would not be used in autonomous weapons systems.
This is not the first time OpenAI has faced opposition over its collaboration with the military. In February 2024, dozens of activists gathered near the entrance to the company’s headquarters after the company removed a condition banning military and war applications from its usage policies. Just days after the amendment, OpenAI announced that it was collaborating with the Pentagon on several projects.
Surprisingly, some of the current disagreement is also coming from within the company’s own ranks. OpenAI and about 1,000 Google employees signed an open letter The companies were demanded to reject the Pentagon’s demand to use their AI technology for mass surveillance and autonomous weapons.
More on AI: After Anthropic was banned from military use, the Pentagon is still relying on it heavily in the Iran war.
