OpenAI CEO Sam Altman defended his company’s work with the U.S. government on Thursday as the battle between the Pentagon and rival AI company Anthropic rages on.
Altman said “we have to trust in the democratic process” in the U.S., calling it “bad for society” if companies stop working for the government because they don’t like who’s in charge, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The CEO also said, “The government is supposed to be more powerful than private companies.” Altman made the comments at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference in San Francisco, California.
Altman has cozied up to Trump since the start of the president’s second term in January 2025 and has clearly taken the side of the Trump regime in its fight with Anthropic. But that stance has created tension internally at OpenAI, with employees upset that Altman rushed to agree to terms many see as detrimental to the human race.
The Pentagon had demanded Anthropic drop guardrails that prohibit its AI model Claude from being used for mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons. When Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei refused, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said he’d be blacklisting the company as a supply chain risk, something unprecedented for an American company.
It’s unclear if Anthropic has been served with formal notice yet, though an anonymous source with the government told Bloomberg that step has occurred. Anthropic didn’t immediately respond to questions emailed Thursday afternoon.
Altman’s alliance with the Trump regime means that he’s obviously going to defend this government’s actions no matter the cost. But it also raises questions about what Altman means when he says that governments should be more powerful than corporations.
OpenAI operates in every country around the world except Belarus, China, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Russia, and Venezuela, according to data published by the company last month. Many places where the company operates might be called old-school allies to the U.S., including Canada, a country that Trump has threatened with invasion and annexation on more than one occasion.
Canadian officials recently sat down with executives at OpenAI after it was revealed that a mass shooter had been flagged in the company’s systems for plotting an attack. OpenAI didn’t notify the authorities ahead of time and received some criticism both inside and outside Canada for the decision. Canada was assured that OpenAI will work on “new protocols” in order to identify high-risk cases, according to the Wall Street Journal, though it’s not entirely clear what that means.
But what happens if those protocols are considered too restrictive or too loose by a different government? Which international authority gets to tell OpenAI what to do, and should that apply globally? Those are questions that have been encountered by Big Tech before, even when it comes to speech in liberal democracies, where certain types of speech may be illegal in one part of the world and legal in another.
Swastikas, for example, are illegal in Germany. And Australia’s top court has found that news organizations are liable for anything defamatory said by random users in the comment on their Facebook and Instagram pages. These are tough questions to navigate internationally, especially when you have competing interests in a newly dangerous world of upturned alliances.
But there’s no sense in pretending like Altman is talking about anyone but Trump when he says that governments should be more powerful than private companies. He’s an oligarch in a system where he’s purchased his seat at the table. OpenAI executives have given millions of dollars to Trump, and there’s just no way that they’re going to go along with the agenda of Woke 2 in a scenario where they have to adhere to whatever a Democratic president or leader of a liberal Western democracy says.
That’s even more true as Trump upends the world order in real time. The U.S. has been bombing Iran for almost a week, and a new report from Politico suggests the war is expected to last through September. The president is plundering Venezuela after kidnapping that country’s president and keeps talking about invading Cuba to install new leadership.
Sam Altman can talk all he wants about how much he believes that governments should be the ones in charge, but that should be taken with a huge grain of salt. Altman and his buddies are the ones in charge right now, and oligarchs are jockeying for Trump’s favor. We’ll see how he feels as soon as Trump leaves or a European leader says something that displeases the president.
