Kalinowski announced her resignation in a lengthy post on X saying, “AI has an important role in national security. But surveillance of Americans without judicial oversight and lethal autonomy without human authorization are lines that deserved more deliberation than they got.”
In 2024, Anthropic and Palantir partnered with Amazon Web Services to provide U.S. intelligence and defense agencies access to their Claude AI model. This was negotiated under the General Services Administration’s (GSA) “OneGov” agreement, which the GSA has now pulled and terminated.
On February 27, President Trump ordered all federal agencies to “immediately cease all use” of Anthropic’s technology, in response to Anthropic’s refusal to remove “red lines” that would bar the Pentagon from using its Claude models for mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons systems that can fire without human involvement.
One day later, Open AI announced that they had replaced Anthropic as a new service provider under the same security agreement.
In a statement on their website Open AI said: "This language makes explicit that our tools will not be used to conduct domestic surveillance of U.S. persons…The Department also affirmed that our services will not be used by Department of War intelligence agencies like the NSA.”
Although the contract explicitly claims to protect personally identifiable information or PII, cell phone data is not considered PII. This gives the Department of Defense sweeping, real-time access to cell phone data from US Citizens.
Kalinowski’s resignation defines the deepening ethical fault lines within the AI Race. Hundreds of OpenAI and Google employees had previously signed an open letter calling on their companies to maintain limits on AI use for mass surveillance and autonomous weapons
The controversy appears to have damaged OpenAI’s reputation among some consumers, with ChatGPT uninstalls surging 295 percent the day after the announcement.
As of Saturday afternoon, ChatGPT and Claude remain the U.S. App Store’s No. 1 and No. 2 free apps.
