OpenAI on Surveillance and Autonomous Killings: You’re Going to Have to Trust Us

On February 27, Sam Altman announced on X that OpenAI had secured a Defense Department contract that, he said, reflects the company’s safety principles prohibiting domestic mass surveillance and requiring human responsibility for the use of force, including autonomous weapon systems.

“OpenAI claims it has accomplished what Anthropic couldn’t: securing a Pentagon contract that won’t cross professed red lines against dragnet domestic spying and the use of artificial intelligence to order lethal military strikes”

The Intercept

The deal follows the public collapse of a similar Pentagon negotiation with Anthropic — which Anthropic said failed because it could not lock those prohibitions into contract language, a stance that led President Donald Trump to order the government to phase out Anthropic’s tools within six months.

The Intercept

The Intercept reports that neither the Department of Defense nor OpenAI has released the actual contract, and OpenAI provided only PR-heavy snippets and public statements rather than the binding text that would verify Altman’s claims.

OpenAI executives including Katrina Mulligan and Altman have posted explanations claiming they negotiated stricter protections.

They say those protections include contract language that bars use by the NSA and other intelligence agencies unless a follow-on modification is made.

The Intercept

Mulligan declined to share the contract language when pressed, telling one X user she was not obligated to do so and suggesting she would work with the NSA if the right safeguards existed.

Altman cited a clause that the system "shall not be intentionally used for domestic surveillance of U.S. persons and nationals" and is "consistent with applicable laws."

The article highlights that terms like "intentionally" and "consistent with applicable laws" are legally ambiguous escape hatches that cannot be evaluated without the contract text.

Former officials and legal experts quoted by The Intercept expressed deep skepticism.

“OpenAI claims it has accomplished what Anthropic couldn’t: securing a Pentagon contract that won’t cross professed red lines against dragnet domestic spying and the use of artificial intelligence to order lethal military strikes”

The Intercept

Brad Carson said he did not believe the provision excluding Pentagon spy agencies is in the contract.

An unnamed former Pentagon AI official warned that caveats around 'intentional' surveillance are a 'get out of jail free card'.

Alan Rozenshtein called OpenAI's refusal to release the contract while marketing its protections 'not sustainable' and 'bizarre'.

The article also notes that Mulligan's assertion that the Pentagon has no legal authority to analyze commercially available data is contradicted by a declassified 2022 ODNI report and reporting on long-standing Pentagon purchases and analyses of commercially available personal data.

It cites past episodes, including James Clapper's 2013 testimony and subsequent Snowden disclosures, to illustrate how terms like 'wittingly' or 'intentionally' have been used to obscure domestic surveillance.

The Intercept highlights that OpenAI promises technical safeguards and "experts in the loop" but provides no detail on how those would constrain the sprawling DoD bureaucracy.

CNBC reported Altman told staff that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth would hold ultimate authority over contract use.

The Intercept

The piece catalogs credibility concerns about the principal actors — Altman (citing a 2025 court filing and Ilya Sutskever's memo alleging patterns of lying), Hegseth (described as having overseen controversial covert actions), and Donald Trump (characterized in the article as reshaping agencies).

It concludes that without the contract in sunlight the public is being asked to trust Altman, Donald Trump, and Hegseth.

The article asserts that the lack of transparency and accumulated evidence of obfuscation justify deep mistrust and alarm.

The piece's closing line presents what it says is a "full-on authoritarian takeover" by Donald Trump.