Caitlin Kalinowski announced today that in response to OpenAI’s controversial deal with the Department of Defense, she has stepped down from her role as head of the company’s hardware team.
“It wasn’t an easy call,” Kalinowski said in a social media post. “Artificial intelligence has an important role in national security. But surveillance of Americans without judicial oversight and lethal autonomy without human permission are lines that deserved more debate than they have.”
Kalinowski, who previously led the augmented reality glasses team at Meta, joined OpenAI in November 2024. In her announcement today, she emphasized that the decision was about “principles, not people” and said she has “deep respect” for CEO Sam Altman and the OpenAI team.
In a subsequent post on Xadded Kalinowski, “To be clear, my point is that the announcement was rushed without setting the guardrails in place. It’s a matter of governance first and foremost. These are very important deals or announcements that can’t be rushed.”
An OpenAI spokesperson confirmed Kalinowski’s departure to TechCrunch.
“We believe our agreement with the Pentagon creates a workable path for responsible uses of artificial intelligence at the national level, while making our red lines clear: no domestic surveillance and no autonomous weapons,” the company said in a statement. “We recognize that people have strong views on these issues and we will continue to engage in discussions with officials, government, civil society and communities around the world.”
OpenAI’s deal with the Pentagon was announced just a week ago, after talks between the Pentagon and Anthropic broke down as the AI firm tried to negotiate safeguards preventing its technology from being used in mass domestic surveillance or fully autonomous weapons. The Pentagon subsequently labeled Anthropic a supply chain risk. (Anthropic said it would fight the designation in court; meanwhile, Microsoft, Google and Amazon said they would continue to make Anthropic’s Claude available to non-defense customers.)
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OpenAI then quickly announced an agreement of its own that allows its technology to be used in classified environments. As executives tried to explain the deal on social media, the company described it as “a more expansive, multi-layered approach” based not only on contract language, but also technical safeguards to protect against red lines similar to Anthropic’s.
However, the controversy appears to have damaged OpenAI’s reputation among some consumers, with ChatGPT uninstalls increasing by 295% and Claude climbing to the top of the App Store charts. As of Saturday afternoon, Claude and ChatGPT remain the number one and number two free apps on the US App Store, respectively.
This post has been updated to correct the description of Kalinowski’s role with OpenAI.
