2 weeks Ago
Among the thousands of fans screaming in awe at Taylor Swift’s New Orleans concert over the weekend was Katrina Mulligan, who leads national security policy and partnerships at OpenAI. In a photo she posted to LinkedIn, Mulligan is grinning widely behind sparkling heart-shaped glasses. Pictured next to her and donning a Swift-inspired mirror-ball cowboy hat, is the Secretary of the Army, Christine Wormuth.
“I went to see Taylor Swift in New Orleans with the Secretary of the Army and it was every bit as EPIC as it sounds,” Mulligan posted on Sunday. Less epic were the optics of a senior government official hanging out with a top advisor to an AI company that recently began competing for, and landing, government contracts. After dropping a clause in its usage terms in January about banning applications for “military and warfare,” the world’s largest AI company, recently valued at $157 billion, has been aggressively courting the Pentagon.
Last week, the Intercept reported on the first publicly known example of the Pentagon’s use of OpenAI applications through a contract with Microsoft, which resells OpenAI’s products. U.S.
Army spokesperson, Colonel Randee Farrell, said in a statement Wormuth attended the concert in “her personal capacity” at her own expense. Her “personal friendship with Ms. Mulligan is based on the nearly two years they worked together at the Pentagon,” Farrell said.
“Their conversations at the event focused on the music and the energy of the concert.” Farrell added that the Army has no current or pending contracts with OpenAI. OpenAI spokesperson, Liz Bourgeois, said in a statement that Wormuth and Mulligan “are friends and made these plans when Katrina worked for Secretary Wormuth and long before Katrina joined OpenAI.
” That close connection could be concern for OpenAI's competitors, said Kathleen Clark, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis, who focuses on government ethics. “Those competing with OpenAI for contracts may wonder whether the Secretary of the Army needs to recuse from participation in decision-making if she has a close personal relationship with Mulligan,” Clark said.
“If I were the Secretary of the Army and I were Mulligan's friend, I'd ask her to remove the post — or at least edit to remove reference to my official position.” Wormuth, who was sworn in as Secretary of the Army in May 2021 after being nominated by President Joe Biden, has been a vocal proponent of AI inside the Pentagon. Soon after her appointment, she announced that her number two priority for the Army was to become “data centric” on the battlefield.
She has described a future in which AI-powered robots are the first line of attack and earlier this year revealed the Army was using AI to identify prospective recruits. With growing Pentagon interest in generative AI applications, OpenAI has been vying to build a military sales operation. Earlier this month, Forbes reported that OpenAI had partnered with Carahsoft, a contractor that offers tech companies an easier way to sell their services to the federal government, including the Pentagon, through so-called contract vehicles.
So far, the Carahsoft partnership has sold small ChatGPT licenses worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to NASA, the National Gallery of Art and the Department of Agriculture. But OpenAI is also one of several vendors included in a Carahsoft contract vehicle for the Pentagon called Computer Hardware, Enterprise Software and Solutions, or CHESS, that aims to be “the Army’s primary source for commercial IT,” though a contract hasn’t been completed. The contracting efforts have run parallel to a government-focused hiring boom at OpenAI.
It appointed former National Security Agency director Paul Nakasone to its board in June, then this month recruited an ex-White House official as its chief economist. Dane Stuckey, the former security head at defense contractor Palantir also announced this month he was joining OpenAI in the same role, pointing to OpenAI’s goal of enabling “democratic institutions to maximally benefit from these technologies, and drive the development of safe AGI for the world.” Mulligan joined OpenAI the same month it altered its usage terms to permit work with the Pentagon.
A longtime national security advisor – with stints in the White House, the Department of Justice and the National Counterterrorism Center — she most recently served as Secretary Wormuth’s chief of staff, where she provided “strategic advice on public policy, public affairs, strategic communications, legislative affairs, operations, and management,” according to her Linkedin. Soon after joining the Secretary’s staff, she posted on X: “I’m not trying to brag, but being chief of staff to @SecArmy Christine Wormuth might be the best job in the Pentagon.” Earlier this year, she shared an image of the Army Secretary wearing a leopard-print coat alongside U.
S. service members in military fatigues. “You wanna see some boss lady energy?” Mulligan wrote .
“I love her SO. MUCH.” In her Taylor Swift post over the weekend, multiple OpenAI employees cheered her on.
Felipe Millon, who leads OpenAI’s government sales, responded with a ‘fire’ emoji. Another OpenAI employee, Anna Min, wrote: “love this.” Replying to one colleague who commented on the post, Mulligan wrote: “I’ve definitely peaked.
” Rashi Shrivastava contributed reporting..
