Fear generates attention, and OpenAI usually knows how to use that. But in court, the company is trying to discredit an AI expert as a doomsday prophet, even though CEO Sam Altman spent years spreading the same warnings when they still served his own agenda.
In a letter to AI Minister Evan Solomon, OpenAI has promised the Canadian government it will tighten its safety protocols. The move follows a fatal shooting at a school in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, that killed eight people. The suspect, Jesse Van Rootselaar, had previously interacted with ChatGPT. An internal algorithm flagged the interactions as possible warnings of real-world violence, and OpenAI employees reviewed them. The company blocked the account but ultimately decided not to contact police.
According to the Wall Street Journal, OpenAI now plans to adopt more flexible criteria for sharing account data with authorities, establish direct lines of communication with Canadian law enforcement, and improve its systems for detecting evasion tactics. OpenAI Vice President Ann O'Leary said the account would have been reported under the new rules. Canada's Justice Minister Sean Fraser warned that new AI regulations could follow if OpenAI doesn't act quickly.
Large language models learn from web data, but which pages actually make it into training sets depends heavily on a seemingly mundane choice: the HTML extractor. Researchers at Apple, Stanford, and the University of Washington found that three common extraction tools pull surprisingly different content from the same web pages.
Anthropic says it will take the US government to court after Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth moved to classify the AI company as a supply chain risk, a designation previously reserved for foreign adversaries. Anthropic calls the classification illegal and says it will "challenge any supply chain risk designation in court."
We believe this designation would both be legally unsound and set a dangerous precedent for any American company that negotiates with the government.
Anthropic
Hegseth also implied military suppliers should no longer be allowed to do business with Anthropic. But according to Anthropic, there's no legal basis for that move: the classification under 10 USC 3252 only applies to the use of Claude in direct contracts with the Department of Defense. For private customers, commercial contracts, and access through the API or claude.ai, nothing would change.
The conflict traces back to a failed negotiation process. Anthropic refused to release Claude for mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons systems, arguing that current AI models are too unreliable for these purposes and that mass surveillance violates fundamental rights. OpenAI has since taken over the deal.
OpenAI struck a deal with the Pentagon just hours after Anthropic was barred from government contracts. OpenAI claims to operate under the same safety principles as Anthropic, but the language both companies have used so far suggests differences.
Anthropic's dispute with the Pentagon is now rippling through Google and OpenAI. According to the New York Times, more than 100 Google AI employees sent a letter to chief scientist Jeff Dean—who had previously voiced support for Anthropic's position—demanding that Google draw the same red lines: no surveillance of American citizens and no autonomous weapons without human oversight through Gemini. Separately, nearly 50 OpenAI and 175 Google employees published an open letter criticizing the Pentagon's negotiating tactics.
We hope our leaders will put aside their differences and stand together to continue to refuse the Department of War's current demands for permission to use our models for domestic mass surveillance and autonomously killing people without human oversight.
Quote from the open letter "We will not be divided"
According to the Wall Street Journal, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told his employees that OpenAI is working on its own Pentagon contract that would include the same safety guidelines Anthropic is pushing for. Altman hopes to find a solution that works for other AI companies as well.
