OpenAI hardware executive Caitlin Kalinowski resigns following Pentagon partnership

Caitlin Kalinowski said today that she has resigned from her position leading OpenAI’s hardware team in response to the company’s controversial agreement with the Department of Defence.

“This wasn’t an easy call,” Kalinowski wrote in a post on social media. “AI has an important role in national security. But surveillance of Americans without judicial oversight and lethal autonomy without human authorisation are lines that deserved more deliberation than they got.”

Kalinowski, who previously led the team responsible for building augmented reality glasses at Meta, joined OpenAI in November 2024. In her statement today, she said the decision was “about principle, not people” and added that she has “deep respect” for CEO Sam Altman and the rest of the OpenAI team.

In a follow-up post on X, Kalinowski added, “To be clear, my issue is that the announcement was rushed without the guardrails defined. It’s a governance concern first and foremost. These are too important for deals or announcements to be rushed.”

An OpenAI spokesperson confirmed that Kalinowski has left the company.

“We believe our agreement with the Pentagon creates a workable path for responsible national security uses of AI while making clear our red lines: no domestic surveillance and no autonomous weapons,” the company said in a statement. “We recognise that people have strong views about these issues and we will continue to engage in discussion with employees, government, civil society and communities around the world.”

OpenAI’s agreement with the Pentagon was announced a little more than a week ago, after talks between the Pentagon and Anthropic collapsed when the AI company sought safeguards to prevent its technology from being used for mass domestic surveillance or for fully autonomous weapons. The Pentagon later designated Anthropic as a supply-chain risk. Anthropic said it plans to challenge that designation in court. In the meantime, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon said they would continue offering Anthropic’s Claude to customers outside defence-related use cases.

OpenAI then quickly announced an agreement of its own that allows its technology to be used in classified environments. As company executives explained the arrangement on social media, OpenAI described it as taking “a more expansive, multi-layered approach” that relies not only on contract language but also on technical safeguards to enforce red lines similar to those Anthropic had sought.

Even so, the controversy appears to have hurt OpenAI’s standing among some consumers. ChatGPT uninstalls reportedly jumped 295%, while Claude climbed to the top of the App Store rankings. As of Saturday afternoon, Claude and ChatGPT were still holding the number one and number two spots, respectively, among free apps in the U.S. App Store.