“We’ve actually held our red lines with integrity rather than colluding with them to produce ‘safety theater’ for the benefit of employees (which, I absolutely swear to you, is what literally everyone at [the Pentagon], Palantir, our political consultants, etc, assumed was the problem we were trying to solve),” Amodei reportedly wrote.
“The real reasons [the Pentagon] and the Trump admin do not like us is that we haven’t donated to Trump (while OpenAI/Greg have donated a lot),” he wrote, referring to Greg Brockman, OpenAI’s president, who gave a Pac supporting Trump $25m in conjunction with his wife.
Another reason is that Sam Altman has been willing to "play ball" like providing high-profile (though meaningless) big announcements Trump likes to tout as successes. For example:
> "The Stargate AI data center project worth $500 billion, announced by US President Donald Trump in January 2025, is reportedly running into serious trouble.
More than a year after the announcement, the joint venture between OpenAI, Oracle, and Softbank hasn't hired any staff and isn't actively developing any data centers, The Information reports, citing three people involved in the "shelved idea."
Reminds me of when they cut the camera to Zuck and he made the $600 Billion Deal announcement, but was hot mic'd after and said "I'm sorry I wasn't ready... I wasn't sure what number you wanted to go with". I will be extremely surprised if half of these deals actually go through
“The real reasons [the Pentagon] and the Trump admin do not like us is that we haven’t donated to Trump (while OpenAI/Greg have donated a lot),” he wrote, referring to Greg Brockman, OpenAI’s president, who gave a Pac supporting Trump $25m in conjunction with his wife.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/mar/04/sam-altma...