OpenAI just dragged its own brand

Winning the Department of War as a client made OpenAI look ‘opportunistic and sloppy,’ according to Sam Altman himself.

[Source Photo: Kyle Grillot/Bloomberg/Getty Images]

It sounds like a brag-worthy business coup: not just snagging a high-profile client, but doing so just after your chief rival’s deal with that same client unraveled in a brutally public way. But artificial intelligence pioneer OpenAI’s Pentagon deal didn’t end up being a brand-halo event. To the contrary, “it just looked opportunistic and sloppy”—and that’s the judgment of OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman.

Given widespread concerns about the potential downsides of AI, ranging from mass layoffs to robot overlords, “opportunistic and sloppy” are just about the last attributes OpenAI wants to be associated with, perhaps especially in the context of a Department of War partnership. But this isn’t just an image headache; the brand backlash has included a surge of signups for the rival OpenAI seemed to have bested, Anthropic, whose Claude AI leapt past OpenAI’s ChatGPT to the top of the app charts.

Some of that surge can be attributed to Anthropic’s behavior and rhetoric matching up to its brand image as a thoughtful steward of AI that’s mindful of its possible consequences. It’s a brand image that was........

© Fast Company