Sam Altman wonders: Could the government nationalize artificial general intelligence?

Sam Altman publicly mused about the possibility of AGI being nationalized as a government project during a weekend Q&A on X, while also addressing OpenAI's new contract with the U.S. Department of Defense. The session covered safeguards against domestic surveillance and autonomous weapons, with OpenAI securing explicit contract language prohibiting both. Meanwhile, roughly 100 OpenAI and 856 Google employees signed an open letter opposing AI use in mass surveillance and autonomous killing. Anthropic faced a potential Defense Production Act threat from the DoD after rejecting a Pentagon contract. OpenAI's Head of National Security Partnerships outlined layered deployment safeguards, including cloud-only API access and forward-deployed engineers, arguing the deal sets new industry norms for classified AI deployments.