Author: msophiahawley

Site: VKTR.com

Saved 05 Mar 2026

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Anthropic’s CEO unloads on OpenAI in a leaked memo, accusing the rival lab of misrepresenting its Pentagon AI deal and fueling a growing fight over military AI.

Key Takeaways

• In a leaked memo, Dario Amodei accused OpenAI of relying on largely symbolic safeguards in its Pentagon AI contract.
• Anthropic says it walked away from negotiations with the US Department of Defense over surveillance and autonomous weapons concerns.
• Amodei claims the Pentagon rejected Anthropic’s safeguards but accepted weaker terms from OpenAI.

A newly surfaced internal memo from Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei offers an unusually blunt look at the growing conflict between the AI startup and rival OpenAI over military AI contracts with the US Department of Defense.

In the message to employees, Amodei accused OpenAI of deploying what he called “safety theater” to secure a Pentagon deal that Anthropic refused to sign.

“Our general sense is that these kinds of approaches… are maybe 20% real and 80% safety theater,” Amodei wrote in the roughly 1,600-word memo, referring to technical safeguards OpenAI reportedly proposed for its models.

The comments come amid an escalating standoff between Anthropic, the Pentagon and OpenAI over how artificial intelligence systems should be deployed in national security operations.

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The Full Leaked Memo – Amodei

For example, it is legal for DoW to buy a bunch of private data on US citizens from vendors who have obtained that data in some legal way (often involving hidden consents to sell to third parties) and then analyze it at scale with AI to build profiles of citizens, their loyalties, movement patterns in physical space (the data they can get includes GPS data, etc), and much more.

Notably, near the end of the negotiation the DoW offered to accept our current terms if we deleted a specific phrase about “analysis of bulk acquired data”, which was the single line in the contract that exactly matched this scenario we were most worried about. We found that very suspicious. On autonomous weapons, the DoW claims that “human in the loop is the law”, but they are incorrect. It is currently Pentagon policy (set during the Biden admin) that a human has to be in the loop of firing a weapon. But that policy can be changed unilaterally by Pete Hegseth, which is exactly what we are worried about. So it is not, for all intents and purposes, a real constraint.

A lot of OpenAI and DoW messaging just straight up lies about these issues or tries to confuse them.

I think these facts suggest a pattern of behavior that I’ve seen often from Sam Altman, and that I want to make sure people are equipped to recognize:

He started out this morning by saying he shares Anthropic’s redlines, in order to appear to support us, get some of the credit, and not be attacked when they take over the contract. He also presented himself as someone who wants to “set the same contract for everyone in the industry” — e.g. he’s presenting himself as a peacemaker and dealmaker.

Behind the scenes, he’s working with the DoW to sign a contract with them, to replace us the instant we are designated a supply chain risk. But he has to do this in a way that doesn’t make it seem like he gave up on the red lines and sold out when we wouldn’t. He is able to superficially appear to do this, because (1) he can sign up for all the safety theater that Anthropic rejected, and that the DoW and partners are willing to collude in presenting as compelling to his employees, and (2) the DoW is also willing to accept some terms from him that they were not willing to accept from us. Both of these things make it possible for OAI to get a deal when we could not.

The real reasons DoW and the Trump admin do not like us is that we haven’t donated to Trump (while OpenAI/Greg have donated a lot), we haven’t given dictator-style praise to Trump (while Sam has), we have supported AI regulation which is against their agenda, we’ve told the truth about a number of AI policy issues (like job displacement), and we’ve actually held our red lines with integrity rather than colluding with them to produce “safety theater” for the benefit of employees (which, I absolutely swear to you, is what literally everyone at DoW, Palantir, our political consultants, etc, assumed was the problem we were trying to solve).

Sam is now (with the help of DoW) trying to spin this as we were unreasonable, we didn’t engage in a good way, we were less flexible, etc. I want people to recognize this as the gaslighting it is.

Vague justifications like “person X was hard to work with” are often used to hide real reasons that look really bad, like the reasons I gave above about political donations, political loyalty, and safety theater. It’s important that everyone understand this and push back on this narrative at least in private, when talking to OpenAI employees.

Thus, Sam is trying to undermine our position while appearing to support it. I want people to be really clear on this: he is trying to make it more possible for the admin to punish us by undercutting our public support. Finally, I suspect he is even egging them on, though I have no direct evidence for this last thing.

I think this attempted spin/gaslighting is not working very well on the general public or the media, where people mostly see OpenAI’s deal with DoW as sketchy or suspicious, and see us as the heroes (we’re #2 in the App Store now!). It is working on some Twitter morons, which doesn’t matter, but my main worry is how to make sure it doesn’t work on OpenAI employees.

Due to selection effects, they’re sort of a gullible bunch, but it seems important to push back on these narratives which Sam is peddling to his employees.