Last week, ChatGPT creator OpenAI announced that it had appointed retired US Army General and former National Security Administration (NSA) Director Paul Nakasone, who also helmed the military's cybersecurity-focused Cyber Command unit, to its board.
"General Nakasone's unparalleled experience in areas like cybersecurity," OpenAI board chair Bret Taylor said in a statement, "will help guide OpenAI in achieving its mission of ensuring artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity."
But not everyone is thrilled about Nakasone's new role at the AI firm, which will also see the former general seated at OpenAI's Safety and Security Committee. The NSA has long been associated with surveillance of US citizens, and AI-embedded technologies are already renewing and escalating existing surveillance concerns. With that in mind, it might be unsurprising that former NSA employee and famed whistleblower Edward Snowden is among the OpenAI appointment's outspoken detractors.
"They've gone full mask off: do not ever trust OpenAI or its products," Snowden — emphasis his — wrote in a Friday post to X-formerly-Twitter, adding that "there's only one reason for appointing" an NSA director "to your board."
"This is a willful, calculated betrayal of the rights of every person on earth," he continued. "You've been warned."
Snowden wasn't the only prominent cybersecurity figure to raise an eyebrow at the OpenAI news.
"I do think that the biggest application of AI is going to be mass population surveillance," Johns Hopkins University cryptography professor Matthew Green tweeted, "so bringing the former head of the NSA into OpenAI has some solid logic behind it."
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