OpenAI has the same redlines as Anthopic based on Altman's statements [2]. However somehow Anthropic gets banished for upholding their redlines and OpenAI ends up with the cash?
[1]: https://xcancel.com/OpenAI/status/2027846013650932195#m
[2]: https://www.npr.org/2026/02/27/nx-s1-5729118/trump-anthropic...
When Anthropic says they have red lines, they mean "We refuse to let you use our models for these ends, even if it means losing nearly a billion dollars in business."
When OpenAI says they have red lines, they mean "We are going to let the DoD do whatever the hell they want, but we will shake our fist at them while they do it."
That's why they got the contract. The DoD was clear about what they wanted, and OpenAI wasn't going to get anywhere without agreeing to that. They're about as transparent as Mac from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia when he's telling everyone he's playing both sides.
Not even that. They are not shaking anything except their booty.
Deletion with OpenAI isnt really deletion. So I'll waste their resources AND train on low quality slop on my side.
My work degrades theirs.
They don't, inference is cheap, especially for agents because of cache hits. The API prices are just inflated.
They'll say "oops" and then we'll spend the next few years listening to pointless Congressional hearings.
Or In other words you can get to decide two ways to use a lucrative property:
1. designate it private and draft usage of how you allow to use it, per your value system(as long as values don't violate any laws)
2. In face of competition, give up some values and agree to a legal definition of use that favors you.
That goes for domestic actions too, happy to arm a paramilitary and set them loose against citizens who are not politically aligned with Trump... the Republican Senate barely even blinks. Hard to imagine they'd care about AI use in mass surveillance, nor AI use in automated anti-personnel weapons. The Senate will be, 'Oh no they unlawfully killed USA citizens, again... Welp, let me check my insider trading gains... yh, seems fine'.
"Redlines" are edits to a contract, sent by lawyers to the other party they're negotiating with. They show up in Word's Track Changes mode as red strikethrough for deleted content.
They are negotiating the specifics of a contract, and Anthropic's contract was overly limiting to the DoD, whereas OpenAI's was not.
In this case “red lines” as a term is being used as “lines than can not be crossed”
Anthropic wanted guardrails on how their tech was used. DOD was saying that wasn’t acceptable.
s/DoD/DoW/g> Among U.S. federal agencies, the order authorized the official use of the secondary title "Department of War" for the United States Department of Defense. The department now refers to itself as the "Department of War" for non-statutory purposes, but is still technically named the Department of Defense, as only an act of Congress can formally change the name of a federal department.
Very gracious of OpenAI to say Anthropic should not be designated a supply chain risk after sniping their $200 million contract by being willing to contractually let the government do whatever they like without restrictions.
Right, wouldn't they need a moderation layer that could, for example, fire if it analyzed & labeled too many banal English conversations?
They really gave training credit for guardtrails? I mean, it could perhaps reject prompts about designing social credit systems sometimes, but I can't imagine realistic mitigations to mass domestic surveillance generally.
https://openai.com/index/our-agreement-with-the-department-o...
The current administration is so incompetent that I find this perfectly believable.
I imagine the government signed with OpenAI in order to spite Anthropic. The terms wouldn't actually matter that much if the purpose was petty revenge.
I don't know if that's actually what happened here, I just find it plausible.
Grifters gonna grift.
Anyway, it is also amusing to hear tech people defend their right to earn some of the fattest salaries on this planet using the smol bean technique after a decade of "why wouldn't the West Virginian coal miner just learn to code." It was always about maintaining the lifestyle of yearly Japan vacations and MacBook upgrades and never about subsistence.
Mind blown. Isn't documentation a prime use case for "AI"?
How can AI accurately describe itself in full?
Ask ChatGPT to describe itself, you may get valid documentation and API calls, or you may get the API for GPT-3 (not ChatGPT, before that). I have had both happen.
Did it in one word, easy
What's next?
But yeah, I'd expect them to change jobs in the coming year or otherwise I'm going to agree with you.
Kinda sucks if you take a seven figure per annum job and are now dependent on their level of income. Quick question: Is this true for everyone? If I take a job that pays twice of what I earn now, my food spending is going to double for instance? Or is this an american thing?
I imagine it'd be hard to take your family from healthy meals back to rice and beans.
Or they all just get fancy cars and big houses to show off, who knows. I certainly can't be sure how my life would change with 7 figures.
Like the people working at OpenAI had no other choice than to pick this cushy job (some have salaries of 500k per year), instead of anything else.
It’s an extreme personal opinion, but; all people working at OpenAI after this debacle are more than happy to make AI for war, because Food and Shelter.
I find your comment fitting this forum, it is where all this enabling started anyways.
Effectively the message is 'we don't mind you being an asshole, as long as you're rich'.
https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20240222-air-canada-chatb...
> the airline said the chatbot was a "separate legal entity that is responsible for its own actions".
Much of the impunity is now Supreme Court settled law.
We see clearly unconstitutional behavior every day, and there is no systematic, timely or effective, push back from any constitutionally enabled oversight.
Checks and balances don't work, when players are more loyal to party than branch or constitution.
Unfortunately, there are no constitutional checks, balances or limits on single party control. And single party control negates all the others. That one party can majority control all three branches is a serious failure mode in political incentives (bipartisanship is highly disincentivized) and governance (even temporary or shaky full control incentivizes making full control permanent over all other "policies").
Until the last few decades, diverse concerns across states avoided tight centralization within parties, and therefore across branches.
Except they are not "more stringent".
Sam Altman is being brazen to say that.
In their own agreement as Altman relays:
> The AI System will not be used to independently direct autonomous weapons in any case where law, regulation, or Department policy requires human control
> any use of AI in autonomous and semi-autonomous systems must undergo rigorous verification, validation, and testing
> For intelligence activities, any handling of private information will comply with the Fourth Amendment, the National Security Act of 1947 and the Foreign Intelligence and Surveillance Act of 1978, Executive Order 12333, and applicable DoD directives
> The system shall also not be used for domestic law-enforcement activities except as permitted by the Posse Comitatus Act and other applicable law.
I don't think their take is completely unreasonable, but it doesn't come close to Anthropic's stance. They are not putting their neck out to hold back any abuse - despite many of their employees requesting a joint stand with Anthropic.
Their wording gives the DoD carte blanch to do anything it wants, as long as they adopt a rationale that they are obeying the law. That is already the status quo. And we know how that goes.
In other words, no OpenAI restriction at all.
That is not at all comparable to a requirement the DoD agree not to do certain things (with Anthropic's AI), regardless of legal "interpretation" fig leaves. Which makes Anthropic's position much "more stringent". And a rare and significant pushback against governmental AI abuse.
(Altman has a reputation for being a Slippery Sam. We can each decide for ourselves if there is evidence of that here.)
That's not quite right.
First off, I don't expect that "you used my service to commit a crime" is in and of itself enough to break a contract, so having your contract state that you're not allowed to use my service to commit a crime does give me tools to cut you off.
Second, I don't want the contract to say "if you're convicted of committing a crime using my service", I want it to say "if you do these specific things". This is for two reasons. First, because I don't want to depend on criminal prosecutors to act before I have standing. Second, because I want to only have to meet the balance of probabilities ("preponderance of evidence" if you're American) standard of evidence in civil court, rather than needing a conviction secured under "beyond a reasonable doubt" standard. IANAL, but I expect that having this "you can't do these illegal things except when they aren't illegal" language in the contract does put me in that position.
They literally asked the DoD to continue as is.
Their is no safety enforcement standing created because their is no safety enforcement intended.
It is transparently written, as a completely reactive response to Anthropic’s stand, in an attempt to create a perception that they care. And reduce perceived contrast with Anthropic.
If they had any interest in safety or ethics, Anthropic’s stand just made that far easier than they could have imagined. Just join Anthropic and together set a new bar of expectations for the industry and public as a whole.
They could collaborate with Anthropic on a common expectation, if they have a different take on safety.
The upside safety culture impact of such collaboration by two competitive leaders in the industry would be felt globally. Going far beyond any current contracts.
But, no. Nothing.
Except the legalese and an attempt to misleadingly pass it off as “more stringent”. These are not the actions of anyone who cares at all about the obvious potential for governmental abuse, or creating any civil legal leverage for safe use.
The Trump administration acts cartoonish and fickle. They can easily punish one group, and then agree to work with another group on the same terms, to save face, while continuing to punish the first group. It doesn't have to make consistent sense. This is exactly how they have done with tariffs for example.
Secondly, the terms are technically different because "all lawful uses" are preserved in this OpenAI deal, and it's just lawyering to the public. Really it was about the phrase "all lawful uses", internally at the DoD I'm sure. So the lawyers were able to agree to it and the public gets this mumbo-jumbo.
I thought mass surveillance of Americans was unlawful by the DoD, CIA and NSA? We have the FBI for that, right? :)
It's even worse than that, because this administration has made it clear they will push as hard as possible to have the law mean whatever they says it means. The quoted agreement literally says "...in any case where law, regulation, or Department policy requires human control" - "Department policy" is obviously whatever Trump says it is ("unitary executive theory" and all that), and there are numerous cases where they have taken existing law and are stretching it to mean whatever they want. And when it comes to AI, any after-the-fact legal challenges are pretty moot when someone has already been killed or, you know, the planet gets destroyed because the AI system decide to go WarGames on us.
But they won't be releasing it, they will be leasing it to DOJ and all their other customers will get the safeguarded model.
As Paul Graham said, "Sam gets what he wants" and "He’s good at convincing people of things. He’s good at getting people to do what he wants." and "So if the only way Sam could succeed in life was by [something] succeeding, then [that thing] would succeed"
--Paul Graham, 2008
"When the president does it, that means it is not illegal".
This was during the Frost/Nixon interviews, years after he had already resigned. Even after all that, he still believed this and was willing to say it into a camera to the American people. It is apparent many of the people pushing the excesses going on today in government share a shameless adherence to this creed.
> On August 7, Nixon met in the Oval Office with Republican congressional leaders "to discuss the impeachment picture," and was told that his support in Congress had all but disappeared. They painted a gloomy picture for the president: he would face certain impeachment when the articles came up for vote in the full House, and in the Senate, there were not only enough votes to convict him, but no more than 15 or so senators were willing to vote for acquittal. That night, knowing his presidency was effectively over, Nixon finalized his decision to resign.
The contrast with how compliant the majorities in Congress are today to the whims of the White House cannot be overstated. The past decade has pretty much completely eliminated any semblance of a Republican Party that stood for anything other than the whims of Trump. Everyone either got on board or was exiled from power; the third highest member of House leadership got driven from Congress for taking a stand on the events of January 6, whereas the senator who in a debate in 2016 alleged that Trump's small hands implied a similar proportion for one of his less-visible body parts faded into the background for the next eight years and was rewarded with a prominent position in the cabinet this time around.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidency_of_Richard_Nixon#Re...
Nobody is prosecuting the DoD with non-laws here. But one company is using their legal right to refuse to facilitate great harms.
> Not rely on the goodness of Sam Altman.
(Who said anything about that? Where did that come from?)
Nobody wants to rely on Altman!
For anything. But it would be better if he would stand up for safety, instead of undermining it.
Your logic is backwards.
If we don’t want to rely entirely on a centralized government alone, increasingly interested in giving its leaders unfettered power, with all three branches increasingly willing to bend our laws and give itself impunity, then a widespread civilian culture of upholding safety by many and all actors is a necessity.
The need for the latter is always a necessity. But the risks of power consolidation, with the help of AI, are rising.
I for one do not want ai labs to designate what is legally ok to do.
I much prefer the demos to take care of that.
Civilians are allowed to put conditions on working for, or supplying, the DoD or any governmental customer.
Tremendous good comes from those that are not willing to facilitate harms, simply because they are legal.
Equating legal with ethical or safe, makes no sense. [0]
[0] All of human history.
Shift from Nonprofit Mission to For-Profit Orientation – OpenAI was founded as a nonprofit with a charter focused on “benefit to humanity,” but under Altman it created a capped-profit subsidiary, accepted large investments (e.g., from Microsoft), and critics (including Elon Musk in a 2024 lawsuit) argue this departed from that original mission. A federal judge allowed Musk’s claim that Altman and OpenAI broke promises about nonprofit governance to proceed to trial.
Nonprofit Control Reorganization Drama (2023) – In November 2023, the original nonprofit board cited a lack of transparency and confidence in Altman’s candor as a reason for firing him. He was reinstated days later after investor and employee pressure, highlighting internal conflict over governance and communication.
Dust-Up Over Military Usage Policies – OpenAI initially had explicit public policies restricting AI use in “military and warfare” contexts, but those clauses were reportedly removed quietly in 2024, allowing the company to pursue Department of Defense contracts — a turnaround from earlier language that appeared to preclude such use.
Statements on Pentagon Deal vs. Prior Positioning – In early 2026, Altman publicly said OpenAI shared safety “red lines” (e.g., prohibiting mass surveillance and autonomous weapons) similar to some competitors, but hours later OpenAI signed a deal to deploy its models on classified military networks, leading critics to argue this contradicts earlier positioning on limits for military use.
Regulation Stance Shifts in Congressional Testimony – Altman has advocated for strong regulation of AI in some public settings but in later congressional hearings opposed specific regulatory requirements (like mandatory pre-deployment vetting), aligning more with industry concerns about overregulation — a shift in tone compared with earlier support of regulatory frameworks.
Anthropic refuses to allow their models to be used for any mass surveillance or fully-automated weapons systems.
OpenAI only requires that the DoD follows existing law/regulation when it comes to those uses.
Unfortunately, existing law is more permissive than Anthropic would have been.
> 'mass surveillance' and 'autonomous killbot' as defined by the government and not the vendor
Whereas OpenAI won their contract on the ability to operationally enforce the red lines with their cloud-only deployment model.
[0]: https://www.wired.com/story/openai-president-greg-brockman-p...
After our interview, Brockman declined WIRED’s request for comment on the ICE shootings. Separately, he offered a more general statement clarifying his thoughts on the conversation with WIRED. "AI is a uniting technology, and can be so much bigger than what divides us today,” he said.
His justifications are just an ever changing rambling mess of word salad that never even come close to addressing the MAGA Inc donation specifically, who is this even for?
We're talking about a pretty straightforward donation to the incumbent President's Super PAC, not ASI solving world hunger or whatever.
Maybe it's just a weak choice of words in anthropic's statement, but the way I read it I get the impression that anthropic is assuming they retain discretion over how their products are used for any purposes not outlined in the contract, while the DoD sees it more along the lines of a traditional sale in which the seller relinquishes all rights to the product by default, and has to enumerate any rights over the product they will retain in the contract.
In other words OpenAI is intentionally attempting to mislead the public. (At least AFAICT.)
OpenAI has more of an understanding that the technology will follow the law.
There may not be explicit laws about the cases Anthropic wanted to limit. Or at least it’s open for judicial interpretation.
The actual solution is Congress should stop being feckless and imbecilic about technology and create actual laws here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Technology_Assessmen...
The dude is notorious for being a compulsive liar, even if supporters have to admit as much.
Also, in the latest Hard Fork episode, Casey or Kevin mentions how the DoD undersecretary in charge of this contract doesn't apparently get along with or even pretty much hates Amodei for some reason. I think this might be the same undersecretary dude who actively commented the whole contract term controversy on X yesterday. Too bad I can't recall his name either.