OpenAI bots lead Caitlin Kalinowski’s resignation in response to Pentagon deal

Chief Device Officer Caitlin Kalinowski announced today that in response to OpenAI’s controversial agreement with the Department of Defense, she has resigned from her role leading the company’s robotics team.

“This was not an easy call,” Kalinowski said in a social media post. “AI has an important role in national security. But surveillance of Americans without judicial oversight and lethal autonomy without human authorization are lines that deserve more deliberation than they have received.”

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

In a follow-up post on

An OpenAI spokesperson confirmed Kalinowski’s departure to TechCrunch.

“We believe our agreement with the Pentagon creates a practical path for responsible national security uses of AI while clarifying our red lines: 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 the debate with employees, government, civil society and communities around the world.”

OpenAI’s agreement with the Pentagon was announced just over a week ago, after discussions between the Pentagon and Anthropic failed when the AI ​​company tried to negotiate safeguards that would prevent its technology from being used for mass domestic surveillance or fully autonomous weapons. The Pentagon later designated Anthropic as 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.)

After that, OpenAI quickly announced an agreement of its own that would allow its technology to be used in classified environments. As executives tried to explain the deal on social media, the company described it as taking a “more broad, multi-layered approach” that relies not only on contract language, but also on technical safeguards, to protect red lines similar to Anthropy’s.

However, the controversy appears to have damaged OpenAI’s reputation among some consumers, with ChatGPT uninstalls rising by 295% and Cloud climbing to the top of the App Store charts. As of Saturday afternoon, Claude and ChatGPT remain the No. 1 and No. 2 free apps in the US App Store, respectively.