[nonameiguess]

Not advocating for or against, but US federal information systems have a very specific way of dealing with the possibility of data leaks like this. It clearly isn't perfect and non-classified data is breached electronically all the time. To my knowledge, no classified system has ever been breached remotely, but data can be and is exfiltrated by compromised or malicious insiders.

In any case, data at impact-level (IL) 2-4 is considered sensitive enough that it has to reside at least in a FedRamp certified data center that is only available to the government and not shared with any other tenants. IL5 also has to have access gated behind some sort of smart card-based identify verification system in which human users can only have credentials issued in-person after being vouched for by an agency sponsor. Anything higher-impact than that is classified and kept on completely segregated networks with no two-way comms capabilities with the public Internet. Top-secret networks are also segregated physically from secret networks. The data centers housing classified data are all located on military installations.

It doesn't mean by any stretch there are no concerns or even that none of your specific concerns are wrong-headed, but it at least means OpenAI itself is never going to see classified data. They don't provide the level of detail needed to know how they're implementing this in a press release, but my sense reading this is that there is no self-hosted version of ChatGPT available for IL5 or classified networks, so this is apparently providing access to workstations connected only to public networks, which are already not allowed to store or process higher-IL data.

It might still make it possible for workers to copy in some level of PII that doesn't reach the threshold to qualify for IL5, but the field is evolving so rapidly that I doubt anyone on Hacker News even knows. CMMC 2.0 compliance requirements are only going into effect later this year and are a pretty radical departure and far more strict than previous certifications that information systems needed to process government data of any kind. Anybody speaking to what the requirements or restrictions are from even just a few months ago are already out-of-date and that includes me. I'm talking about restrictions as I knew them, but they'll be even more restrictive in the very near future.