Here's your Forbes Daily Briefing for Sunday, March 8th.

Today on Forbes, OpenAI blurs its mass surveillance red line with new Pentagon contract.

By Sam Altman's own admission, the whirlwind of the last week has weighed heavy on the OpenAI chief.

On Friday, February 27th, he swooped in to take

a Department of War contract from rival Anthropic, capitalizing on a deal that had gone sour

when his competitor's CEO Dario Amode had insisted on contractual limits to its AI's use for

fully autonomous weapons and mass domestic surveillance.

Amode had explained his issues with the contract in a blog post the previous day, saying the

company didn't want any agency to use Claude to create a detailed and accurate picture of

citizens' private lives by making connections between large data sets, all without

the need for a warrant.

He pointed to the U.S. government's purchase of massive data sets of people's locations,

web browsing habits, and other information, typically from data brokers.

AI could be used to bring all those data sources together and make inferences about a given person

or entire populations, representing an unprecedented privacy threat.

Then, over the course of hours that Friday night, talks between the two entities completely

broke down.

In retaliation, the U.S. government designated Anthropic a, quote,

supply chain threat, effectively cutting it off from federal contracts. On Thursday, it was made

official, and Anthropic has said it plans to sue. At first, Altman claimed to have come up

with a compromise, as OpenAI said its agreement with

the Pentagon upheld its red lines, including one that stipulated its tools wouldn't

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