'Opportunistic and sloppy': Top tech CEO breaks with Trump

President Donald Trump is currently warring with AI companies that refuse to do his bidding without question — and one of his former Big Tech pals, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, is apologizing to his own workers for his “opportunistic and sloppy” siding with Trump.

“OpenAI believes elected officials, not technology company executives, should ultimately determine the limits of how artificial intelligence can be used in national defense, Chief Executive Sam Altman said at an investor conference Thursday,” reported The Wall Street Journal. Adding that AI companies should “trust in the democratic process,” he advocated for AI CEOs to abide by the humanistic principles preferred by the general public. Despite this statement, both OpenAI and its rival AI company Anthropic had been fighting with the Defense Department about the ethical use of AI, and Altman recently finalized a deal with the Pentagon to use its models in classified settings.

“This process is messy,” Altman said. “This process has some deep flaws, but it is better than all other systems. If we start abandoning that process and our commitment to it because, you know, some people don’t like the person or people currently in charge, that is challenged no matter what. I think it’s bad for society no matter what.”

Acknowledging that the maneuver looked “opportunistic and sloppy,” especially given that Anthropic allowed the Pentagon to break their contract for ethical reasons, Altman added to his employees that “I feel terrible for subjecting you all to this.” Nevertheless, he insisted that the Defense Department had been “extremely understanding” about the need to prevent harmful uses of the technology, concluding that “I think one of the civil liberties of this country that’s most important is the government does not spy without, you know, warrants and good legal process on its own citizens. The definition of what that is going to mean needs to change with technology.”

The Wall Street Journal has criticized Trump for firing Anthropic, arguing last week that doing so was not in the public interest.

“President Trump on Friday banned Anthropic and its AI products from all government contracts, and the Communists must be cheering in Beijing,” wrote The Wall Street Journal’s Editorial Board. “The Administration is making what is a modest dispute over the military uses of AI into a self-destructive show of brute political force that will hurt the U.S. military and the rest of the government.”

Adding that Anthropic’s models are “cutting-edge” and agreeing with their demand that the models not be used for “mass domestic surveillance” or “fully autonomous weapons that strike without a human in the decision loop,” the Journal insisted that “Anthropic doesn’t lack for patriotism. The company says it has left revenue on the table by cutting off firms linked to the Chinese Communist Party. It’s no small matter that a technology company has been willing to help the U.S. military in combat, a change from a decade ago when most of Silicon Valley viewed Pentagon contracts as complicity in imperialism.”

Disclosure: AlterNet, alongside Raw Story and The Intercept, sued OpenAI in February 2024, alleging unauthorized use of their copyrighted journalism to train ChatGPT. The lawsuit claims OpenAI violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) by removing Copyright Management Information (CMI) from articles. The lawsuit seeks damages and an injunction against using their content.