“We consider a democratic vision for AI is crucial to unlocking its full potential and ensuring its advantages are broadly shared,” OpenAI wrote, echoing similar language within the White House memo. “We consider democracies should proceed to take the lead in AI development, guided by values like freedom, fairness, and respect for human rights.”
It offered a variety of ways OpenAI could help pursue that goal, including efforts to “streamline translation and summarization tasks, and study and mitigate civilian harm,” while still prohibiting its technology from getting used to “harm people, destroy property, or develop weapons.” Above all, it was a message from OpenAI that it’s on board with national security work.
The brand new policies emphasize “flexibility and compliance with the law,” says Heidy Khlaaf, a chief AI scientist on the AI Now Institute and a security researcher who authored a paper with OpenAI in 2022 concerning the possible hazards of its technology in contexts including the military. The corporate’s pivot “ultimately signals an acceptability in carrying out activities related to military and warfare because the Pentagon and US military see fit,” she says.
Amazon, Google, and OpenAI’s partner and investor Microsoft have competed for the Pentagon’s cloud computing contracts for years. Those corporations have learned that working with defense might be incredibly lucrative, and OpenAI’s pivot, which comes as the corporate expects $5 billion in losses and is reportedly exploring recent revenue streams like promoting, could signal that it wants a chunk of those contracts. Big Tech’s relationships with the military also not elicit the outrage and scrutiny that they once did. But OpenAI shouldn’t be a cloud provider, and the technology it’s constructing stands to do far more than simply store and retrieve data. With this recent partnership, OpenAI guarantees to assist sort through data on the battlefield, provide insights about threats, and help make the decision-making process in war faster and more efficient.
OpenAI’s statements on national security perhaps raise more questions than they answer. The corporate desires to mitigate civilian harm, but for which civilians? Does contributing AI models to a program that takes down drones not count as developing weapons that would harm people?
“Defensive weapons are still indeed weapons,” Khlaaf says. They “can often be positioned offensively subject to the locale and aim of a mission.”
Beyond those questions, working in defense signifies that the world’s foremost AI company, which has had an incredible amount of leverage within the industry and has long pontificated about steward AI responsibly, will now work in a defense-tech industry that plays by a completely different algorithm. In that system, when your customer is the US military, tech corporations don’t get to determine how their products are used.
