- “Consistent with applicable laws, including the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution, the National Security Act of 1947, and the FISA Act of 1978, the AI system will not be used to knowingly conduct domestic surveillance of US persons and citizens.”
- “For the avoidance of doubt, the Department considers this limitation to prohibit the intentional tracking, monitoring, or surveillance of U.S. persons or citizens, including the procurement or use of commercially obtained personal or identifiable information.”
The significance of these specific changes is not difficult to ascertain. A story from The New York Times yesterday detailed what led to the rift between the Pentagon and OpenAI rival Anthropic — which resulted in Anthropic being designated a “supply-chain risk” and barred from doing business with several major companies.
Essentially, reports at the time say, Anthropic talked about surveillance on Americans tied to some type of unclassified bulk data that could track people’s physical location and browser history. The final breakdown in negotiations resulted from Anthropic’s request for what the Times called “a legally binding promise from the Pentagon not to use its technology on unclassified commercial data.”
The Pentagon has made sure throughout this process that Anthropic has asked for provisions from the Pentagon to not do things that are already illegal. Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell wrote on Twitter that “the War Department has no interest in using AI to conduct mass surveillance of Americans (which is illegal).” Parnell claims the Pentagon only wants to grant authority to do anything legal that will “prevent Anthropic from jeopardizing critical military operations and potentially endangering our war fighters.”
OpenAI’s Sam Altman claims to share Anthropic’s concerns. And according to Altman’s
Here’s a re-post of an internal post:
We are working with the DoW to add some additions to our agreement to make its principles much clearer.
1. We’re going to amend our deal to add this language in addition to everything else:
“• In accordance with applicable laws,…
– Sam Altman (@sama) 3 March 2026
Although it would be speculative at this point to say that OpenAI has suffered any kind of material cost after the Pentagon signed the deal on the eve of the latest US military action against Iran, it would be entirely fair to say that people have become very angry with the company.
There is now a website called QuitGPT, which is calling for a boycott of ChatGPT. There is a small rebuttal without any citations on the homepage that 1,513,922 people (as of this writing) have joined the boycott. The site says participants can “make an example of ChatGPT” and “send a clear signal to ICE supporters that their actions will not be punished.” This doesn’t actually correspond to any substantive difference between what Anthropic and OpenAI are allowing the government to do with their respective products, but it certainly follows Donald Trump labeling the people at Anthropic “leftwing nut jobs.”
Oh and Katy Perry has announced that she has moved to the cloud For all his AI needs. So clearly times are tough for OpenAI.
Gizmodo contacted OpenAI for information about any implications of this apparent response, or whether the company would like to provide any comment. We’ll update if we hear back.
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