By Sam Altman’s own admission, the whirlwind of the last few days have weighed heavy on the OpenAI chief.

On Friday, he swooped in to take a Department of War contract from rival Anthropic, capitalizing on a deal that had gone sour when his competitor’s CEO Dario Amodei had insisted on contractual limits to its AI’s use for fully autonomous weapons and mass domestic surveillance.

Amodei had explained his issues with the contract in a Thursday blog post, saying the company didn’t want any agency to use Claude to create a detailed and accurate picture of citizens’ private lives by making connections between large datasets, all without the need for a warrant. He pointed to the U.S. government’s purchase of massive datasets of people’s locations, web browsing habits and other information, typically from data brokers. AI could be used to bring all those data sources together and make inferences about a given person or entire populations, representing an unprecedented privacy threat.

Then, over the course of hours on Friday night, talks between the two entities completely broke down. In retaliation, the U.S. government designated Anthropic a “supply chain threat,” effectively cutting it off from federal contracts. (Anthropic has said it plans to sue.)

At first, Altman claimed to have come up with a compromise, as OpenAI said its agreement with the Pentagon upheld its red lines, including one that stipulated its tools wouldn’t be used for mass domestic surveillance. The company then followed up with a blog post that said its AI could be used for lawful purposes, and that any handling of private information would adhere to multiple surveillance-related laws that the Pentagon operates under.

“These risks are further aggravated if such data is fed into opaque and often dysfunctional AI systems.” Wolfie Christl, privacy researcher

“These risks are further aggravated if such data is fed into opaque and often dysfunctional AI systems.”

That includes the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which provides a broad remit to the controversial National Security Agency within the Pentagon, allowing it to collect American citizens’ communications with foreign individuals and entities. It also includes Executive Order 12333, which permits bulk data........

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