Altman Proposes Taxing Robots While Selling Them to the Pentagon

GriftMatrix Tech Oligarchy

The company that dropped its ethics lost to the one that kept them

People think I’m a cheerleader for AI. I would say that I’m not a cheerleader for anything. I just want to look at issues logically.

AI is not good or bad – it’s just a tool – used by people – who decide how to use it.

And sometimes – HOW AI is used can be a revelation about the people who created it and the people who use it.

For example – let’s look at what’s happening with OpenAI – the company behind ChatGPT. They lost $14 billion last year.

Fourteen billion.

Deutsche Bank said no startup in history has ever burned money like this. They spend $3.30 for every dollar they bring in.

So last week Sam Altman published a 13-page policy paper about how America needs to tax robots and create a public wealth fund so everyone benefits from AI.

Four-day workweek. New social contract. The whole thing reads like a campaign platform for a guy who isn’t running for anything.

Tax the robots, share the wealth, work less.

Sounds great.

Except five weeks ago his company signed a classified deal with the Pentagon to put their AI models inside the military’s most secure networks. And the only reason they got that deal is because another company said no.

Anthropic – the other big AI company – refused to do mass domestic surveillance. Refused autonomous weapons. They had red lines and they kept them. So Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth did something that had literally never been done before. He designated Anthropic a “supply-chain risk.”

That’s a classification for foreign adversaries. Chinese telecom companies. Compromised vendors. Not an AI startup in San Francisco that said “we’d rather not build a killbot.”

Anyway, a federal judge blocked it.

Judge Rita Lin called it an “Orwellian notion” that an American company could be branded a saboteur for disagreeing with the government. The Pentagon’s own records showed they retaliated against Anthropic for talking to the press. Textbook First Amendment violation.

But by then OpenAI already had the contract. Somewhere between $500 million and $2 billion over five years.

When there was a public outcry against OpenAI for taking the contract, and their employees started quitting, Altman admitted it “looked opportunistic and sloppy.” Said they “shouldn’t have rushed.” So they revised some of the contract language, added some principles about surveillance, and kept the money.

So – the timeline is – in February he reverses his company’s own 2023 ban on military applications to grab a Pentagon contract worth up to $2 billion. In April he publishes a paper saying the government should tax robots and help people whose jobs get destroyed by AI.

Basically – he’s asking the government to cushion the blow from his product while selling a weaponized version of it to the same government.

And the deal only happened because the competitor who said no got punished for it. The company that kept its ethics got branded a national security threat. The company that dropped its ethics got the contract.

I’ve written about OpenAI’s finances before. Their web traffic share dropped from 87% to 65% in the last year. Google ate 16 points of that. Engineers are leaving to work for Anthropic at eight times the rate of the reverse. They’re hemorrhaging cash, hemorrhaging talent, and the grand plan is more data centers and military contracts. They also just raised 122 billion dollars and are planning for an IPO later this year.

But here’s the part that should probably keep Sam Altman up at night.

This week, Anthropic – the company the Pentagon branded a national security threat for having ethics – passed OpenAI in revenue. Thirty billion dollars in annualized revenue, up from nine billion at the end of last year. OpenAI is at twenty-five billion.

The company that said no to the Pentagon tripled their revenue in 3 months and is now making more money than the company that said yes.

And it’s doing it while spending a quarter of what OpenAI spends on training.

OpenAI is projected to burn $125 billion a year on compute by 2030. Anthropic’s projection for the same period is around $30 billion. Same race. Four times less money.

So, Altman raised $122 billion, reversed his ethics policy, took a classified military contract from a competitor that got blacklisted for having principles, and published a paper about how the government should protect people from AI – and his company is still losing. To the company that kept its red lines.

Both companies are planning IPOs later this year. OpenAI wants a trillion-dollar valuation. Analysts at PitchBook looked at both and concluded OpenAI scores weakest on business quality fundamentals despite having the highest valuation.

The company that said no to the Pentagon is now worth more to actual paying customers than the company that said yes. The ethics were the business strategy. And it worked.

That might be the most surprising sentence in American tech right now.

Sources