In a statement announcing its deal, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that its agreement with the Pentagon contains the same two limitations on how the military can use its technology that Anthropic had been insisting on and which the government has said it could not accept.
But OpenAI seems to have sought to enshrine these in the agreement in a different way than Anthropic. While Anthropic tried to have the limits spelled out explicitly in the contract, OpenAI agreed that the Pentagon could use its tech for “any lawful purpose,” while Altman also says of the limitations that OpenAI “put them into our agreement.”
It is unclear exactly how both these things could be true or how the limitations are stated in the agreement. But it may simply be that the contract language highlights that current U.S. law prohibits the Pentagon from deploying A.I. for mass surveillance of Americans and current U.S. military policy states that humans must retain “appropriate levels of human judgment” over the use of lethal force.
OpenAI also said that the Pentagon agreed that the company could build technical solutions into its AI models intended to prevent them from being used for either mass surveillance of U.S. citizens or deployed in lethal autonomous weapons.“We are asking the [Department of War] to offer these same terms to all AI companies, which in our opinion we think everyone should be willing to accept,” Altman said.
