San Francisco, California - OpenAI's top robotics executive said Saturday she had resigned over the AI giant's deal with the Pentagon to allow its technology's deployment for war and domestic surveillance.

The company behind ChatGPT secured a defense contract with the Pentagon last month, hours after rival Anthropic refused to agree to unconditional military use of its technology.

OpenAI's CEO Sam Altman later posted to X, saying the startup would be modifying a contract so its models would not be used for "domestic surveillance of US persons and nationals," after criticism that it was giving too much power to military officials without oversight.

Caitlin Kalinowski said she cared deeply about "the Robotics team and the work we built together," but that "surveillance of Americans without judicial oversight and lethal autonomy without human authorization are lines that deserved more deliberation than they got."

"This was about principle, not people," she wrote in a post on X.

Kalinowski wrote in a follow-up post that she took issue with the haste of OpenAI's Pentagon deal.

"To be clear, my issue is that the announcement was rushed without the guardrails defined," she wrote.

Anthropic's refusal to authorize use of its Claude AI models had prompted backlash from President Donald Trump and members of his administration.

The company was officially designated a supply-chain risk for national security and was banned from working with federal agencies.