On February 28, OpenAI signed a contract with the Department of War (DOW) to deploy its own AI models with the department’s classified network. The deal emerged after the DOW announced it was severing ties with Anthropic, another private AI company, when it refused to remove guardrails around how its AI model Claude would be used. 

Anthropic had initially signed a $200 million deal in July 2025 to build AI tools for US national security. However, when the DOW wanted to use AI tools for mass domestic surveillance and the development of autonomous weapons, Anthropic refused. 

OpenAI, by contrast, hastily signed an agreement with the DOW, raising serious ethical concerns over their lack of regard for how dangerous their tools could be both domestically and overseas. It also reversed its 2023 policy, which explicitly banned the military from accessing its AI models. 

This concerns CFA members because in February 2025, the Chancellor’s Office announced a 17-million-dollar public-private initiative with the privately owned company, OpenAI, to make the CSU the first AI-powered university. 

The CSU-Open AI deal was done without faculty consent and jeopardizes the integrity of a university whose mission is, first and foremost, to serve our students. 

Chancellor García’s deal with OpenAI represents a very risky and menacing incursion of private companies’ interests into CSU infrastructure and workforce development goals. The same company willing to partner with a federal government that has been directly responsible for exacerbating the systemic violence against Black and brown communities, LGBTQIA+ people, women, and persons with disabilities, now has its hands steeped in our students’ education, and likely for the worse. 

OpenAI’s eagerness to sign a contract with the DOW demonstrates its priorities: profit over safety and human welfare. It is no less likely to prioritize profit over students and treat them solely as a training ground to enhance and refine its AI programs. 

To make matters worse, the Chancellor’s Office has been complicit in AI perpetuating harmful stereotypes, including racial and gender biases, through their failure to mention—in the slightest—these well-documented concerns. There has been no transparency or accountability in their AI-initiative. 

In its Ethical and Responsible Use Guide for AI Integration document, CSU management fails to address any of these issues, essentially ignoring the realities of our students, many of whom come from underrepresented and underserved backgrounds. 

In March 2025, CFA filed an unfair practice charge against the Chancellor’s Office for refusing to meet and confer over how the AI initiative would impact faculty. 

In September 2025, Elaine Bernal, CFA Associate Vice President of Lecturers, South, and CSU Long Beach lecturer, gave their testimony regarding the threats that AI poses to our education system, data privacy, intellectual property, academic freedom, and environment sustainability. 

“Let us be clear about bias,” said Bernal. “AI does not just make random errors; it reproduces structural racism. As scholar Ruha Benjamin reminds us in Race After Technology, these systems are not neutral. They encode inequality, including anti-Blackness, into their design. CSU’s students, Black, Indigenous, Latinx, immigrant, queer, trans, first-gen, disabled, should not be handed tools that reinforce the discrimination they already face in society. As a queer Filipino faculty member, I know these inequities personally.” 

In response to these concerns, the CFA Bargaining Team has also proposed a stand-alone article in our Collective Bargaining Agreement on AI that centers on guardrails around the use of AI and protections for faculty. 

As for legislative policy, we are sponsoring Senate Bill 928, which aims to protect CSU employees from the encroachment of artificial intelligence. 

We remind you to sign this petition urging Chancellor García not to renew the CSU’s contract with OpenAI and to use the money to protect jobs at CSU campuses.  

Our members will continue their work to ensure that students receive an education free from corporate interests, motivated entirely by profit, that have no real stake in the teaching or learning outcomes in the CSU. 

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