As Sam Altman discovered Saturday night, it's a fraught time to do work for the U.S. government. Around 7 p.m., the OpenAI CEO announced he would be fielding questions publicly on X, as a way of demystifying his company's decision to pick up the Pentagon contract that Anthropic had just walked away from. Most of the questions boiled down to OpenAI's willingness to participate in mass surveillance and automated killing ' the exact activities Anthropic had ruled out in its negotiations with the Pentagon. Altman typically punted to the public sector, saying it wasn't his role to set national policy. An hour later, he confessed surprise that so many people seemed to disagree. 'There is more open debate than I thought there would be,' Altman said, 'about whether we should prefer a democratically elected government or unelected private companies to have more power. I guess this is something people disagree on.' It's a telling moment for both OpenAI and the tech industry at large. In his...
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