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On March 8, 2026, Caitlin Kalinowski, the head of OpenAI's robot and consumer hardware division, officially announced her resignation. The departure was triggered by a controversial agreement recently reached between OpenAI and the U.S. Department of Defense (now renamed the "Department of War"). As a core expert who previously led the development of Meta's augmented reality glasses, Kalinowski left OpenAI during a critical period of its hardware strategy after joining in November 2024, drawing widespread attention from the industry.
Kalinowski stated on social media that this decision was made "out of principle rather than personal reasons." She warned that the agreement monitored citizens without judicial oversight and granted AI lethal autonomous powers beyond human control, issues that were not adequately discussed. She directly criticized OpenAI for hastily announcing the deal before clear safeguards were defined, which she considered a serious failure of the company's governance system.
Controversy over the Agreement and Market Shock
This turmoil began a week ago when the Pentagon quickly turned to OpenAI after negotiations with Anthropic broke down. Previously, Anthropic had been labeled a "supply chain risk company" by the Pentagon due to its insistence on legal clauses prohibiting mass surveillance and fully autonomous weapons. OpenAI then took over the demand, promising to ensure the red lines through multi-layered technical measures and allowing its technology to enter a classified cloud environment. However, this "last-minute" move angered the public and some employees.
Key Data and Impact:
User Loss: After the agreement was announced, the daily uninstallation rate of the ChatGPT mobile app in the U.S. market surged by 295%.
Market Position Reversal: Competitor Anthropic's Claude app quickly topped the free rankings on the U.S. App Store, while ChatGPT dropped to second place.
Internal Resistance: Nearly a thousand technical staff, including those from OpenAI and Google, have signed a joint letter protesting the militarization of AI.
An OpenAI spokesperson responded that the agreement with the military opened a path for responsible application of AI in national security. However, CEO Sam Altman recently also publicly admitted that announcing the deal at this point was indeed "opportunistic and hasty."