OpenAI Hardware Lead Kalinowski Resigns Over Military AI

On March 8, 2026, Caitlin Kalinowski — OpenAI’s vice president of hardware and robotics, formerly of Meta’s Reality Labs — resigned from the company, citing in a public statement that she could not continue in a leadership role at a company “whose technology is being deployed for military applications that I believe cross fundamental ethical lines.” Her departure was the highest-profile resignation at any major AI company directly linked to the Pentagon AI crisis.

Kalinowski had joined OpenAI in late 2024 to lead the company’s hardware initiatives, including its robotics program and custom chip development. Her resignation was not about hardware — it was about the direction she saw OpenAI heading after the February 27 Pentagon deal. In her statement, Kalinowski wrote that she had raised concerns internally about the classified systems deployment and had been told that the company’s “commercial and strategic obligations” to the Defense Department precluded the kind of safety review she believed was necessary.

The resignation intensified the internal fracture at OpenAI that the employee solidarity letter had exposed. Kalinowski was not a junior researcher or a safety-team member — she was a vice president with direct reports and a significant organizational footprint. Her departure signaled that discomfort with OpenAI’s military pivot extended beyond the idealistic fringes of the company into its senior leadership. Sources familiar with the situation said at least two other senior leaders were considering departures for similar reasons but had not yet made final decisions.

Sam Altman responded to the resignation in an internal memo, thanking Kalinowski for her contributions and stating that OpenAI “takes the ethical dimensions of all its partnerships seriously.” The memo did not address the substance of her concerns. Anthropic, for its part, made no public comment on the resignation, though the company’s recruiting team reportedly reached out to several of Kalinowski’s former direct reports within days.