Competition for tech talent is heating up in the AI industry.
According to a report by The Wall Street Journal, at least two senior employees have resigned from OpenAI after the company announced it had reached a deal with the United States Department of War to deploy its AI models in classified government settings.
In a post on X, Caitlin Kalinowski, who leads robotics and consumer hardware initiatives at OpenAI, said she was stepping down because of the agreement.
“AI has an important role in national security. But surveillance of Americans without judicial oversight and lethal autonomy without human authorization are lines that deserved more deliberation than they got,” she wrote. “This was about principle, not people.”
I resigned from OpenAI. I care deeply about the Robotics team and the work we built together. This wasn’t an easy call. AI has an important role in national security. But surveillance of Americans without judicial oversight and lethal autonomy without human authorization are…
— Caitlin Kalinowski (@kalinowski007) March 7, 2026
Max Schwarzer, OpenAI’s vice president of research, announced his departure a few days earlier on X, saying he would be joining rival AI lab, Anthropic.
“Many of the people I most trust and respect have joined Anthropic over the last couple of years, and I’m excited to work with them again,” Schwarzer wrote, adding that he had been “very impressed with Anthropic’s talent, research taste and values.”
I've decided to leave OpenAI. I'm incredibly proud of all the work I've been part of here, from helping create the reasoning paradigm with @MillionInt, scaling up test-time compute with @polynoamial, working on RL algorithms with my fellow strawberries, shipping o1-preview (which…
— Max Schwarzer (@max_a_schwarzer) March 3, 2026
While the resignations may appear to reflect an internal disagreement over ethics and the role of AI in national security, they also point to a broader contest over company values and the direction of artificial intelligence development.
The tension surrounding this competition traces back to a standoff between Anthropic and the Pentagon. The company had pushed for stricter safeguards around domestic surveillance and the use of autonomous weapons. When talks broke down, the Trump administration moved to designate Anthropic a supply-chain risk.
Anthropic has since seen a surge of public goodwill after Chief Executive Dario Amodei said the company would not compromise its red lines to secure a government deal. Its Claude chatbot briefly reached No. 1 in downloads on the Apple App Store, surpassing OpenAI’s ChatGPT for the first time. Messages of appreciation were even chalked outside the company’s San Francisco headquarters.
With elite engineers able to command compensation packages worth hundreds of millions of dollars, companies have been locked in an aggressive hiring race. Yet the recent departures from OpenAI suggest that ethical concerns and long-term research priorities can be a major factor for talent.
“I think leading from values first has kind of allowed us to build a team that really believes in what we’re doing,” Amodei said last week during a private session at Morgan Stanley’s Technology, Media & Telecom conference in San Francisco, per the Journal.
The competition for talent has intensified across the industry. Firms such as Meta Platforms have aggressively tried to recruit engineers and researchers from rival labs, as AI leaders compete for a limited pool of highly specialized technical talent.
For OpenAI, the Pentagon agreement has triggered internal debate. A company spokeswoman addressed the concerns publicly, saying the partnership with the Department of War would still follow strict boundaries.
“We believe our agreement with the Pentagon creates a workable path for responsible national security uses of AI while making clear our red lines: no domestic surveillance and no autonomous weapons,” the spokeswoman said.
David Adubiina
