OpenAI amends Pentagon deal as Sam Altman admits it looks ‘sloppy’

OpenAI amends Pentagon deal as Sam Altman admits it looks ‘sloppy’ ChatGPT owner’s CEO says it will bar its technology being used for mass surveillance or by intelligence services Business live – latest updates OpenAI is amending its hastily arranged deal to supply artificial intelligence to the US Department of War after the ChatGPT owner’s chief executive admitted it looked “opportunistic and sloppy”. The contract prompted fears the San Francisco startup’s AI could be used for domestic mass surveillance but its boss, Sam Altman, said on Monday night the startup would explicitly bar its technology from being used for that purpose or being deployed by defence department intelligence agencies such as the National Security Agency . OpenAI, which has more than 900 million users of ChatGPT, made the deal almost immediately after the Pentagon’s existing AI contractor, Anthropic, was dropped. Anthropic had insisted “using these systems for mass domestic surveillance is incompatible with democratic values”, leading the US president, Donald Trump, to call Anthropic “leftwing nut jobs” and directing the federal government to stop using its technology. Despite denials from OpenAI that the agreement allowed for surveillance use, commentators raised the spectre of the Snowden scandal , which broke in 2013, when it emerged the NSA was engaged in mass harvesting of phone and internet communications. The deal prompted an online backlash against OpenAI, with users of X and Reddit encouraging a “delete ChatGPT” campaign. One post read : “You’re now training a war machine. Let’s see proof of cancellation.” Claude, the chatbot made by Anthropic, jumped to the top of Apple’s App Store charts, rising above ChatGPT, according to analysis by Sensor Tower. In a message to employees reposted on X, the OpenAI CEO said the original deal announced on Friday had been struck too quickly after Anthropic was dropped. “We shouldn’t have rushed to get this out on Friday,” Altman wrote. “The issues a...