Late last week, the Pentagon dropped its AI contractor, Anthropic, after the company refused to allow the Department of War to use its technology for autonomous weapons systems or for mass surveillance of American citizens.
OpenAI jumped on the opportunity to become the Pentagon’s AI contractor, announcing the deal late on Friday.
The activist group QuitGPT are holding a rally outside of OpenAI’s headquarters in San Francisco from 4 to 6 p.m. today, to protest the deal. Perrin Milliken, who lives in San Francisco, says she’ll be there.
“My biggest thing is like the government shouldn't have that information. And we have a right to privacy and the power of that kind of data in such a few people's hands is really scary to me.”
OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, admitted that it looked “sloppy and opportunistic” and announced changes to the deal on Monday night.
According to Altman, OpenAI will not allow its technology to be used for mass domestic surveillance, to direct autonomous weapons systems, or for high-stakes automated decisions. But for some, like Milliken, that’s not enough.
“I think actions always speak louder than words and we kind of know where Open AI's actions lie.”
OpenAI’s president Greg Brockman and his wife, Anna, gave $25 million to a pro-Trump Super PAC in September 2025. Altman gave $1 million to the president’s inauguration fund in 2024.
More than 900 employees from OpenAI and Google have signed an open letter calling on their employers to “refuse the Department of War's current demands for permission to use our models for domestic mass surveillance and autonomously killing people without human oversight.”
A “delete chatGPT” campaign has been gaining traction online. Claude, another free AI chatbot, became Apple’s most popular free app after OpenAI announced the contract last week.
