HigherEd AI Daily: Mar 9 – OpenAI’s First Senior Exit; 90% of Campus Professionals Now Use AI; Claude Finds 22 Bugs in Firefox

OpenAI's First Senior Exit Over the Pentagon Deal

Caitlin Kalinowski, the head of robotics and consumer hardware at OpenAI, resigned on Sunday. She cited the company's agreement to deploy AI on the Pentagon's classified cloud networks without enough guardrails on surveillance and lethal autonomy. Her departure is the first senior-level exit tied directly to the deal.

Why it matters for your campus. Your students are asking whether the tools you assign them are ethically sound. This story gives you a real example to bring into class. It also signals that even inside the most powerful AI labs, people draw lines.

90 Percent of Campus Professionals Now Use AI. The Gap Is in Governance.

Ellucian's third annual higher education AI survey found that 90 percent of higher ed professionals now use AI in some form, up from 84 percent the year before. The survey signals that personal AI adoption is nearing a ceiling. The new challenge is institutional strategy. Data privacy remains the top barrier to moving from individual use to campus-wide policy.

Why it matters for your campus. The conversation has shifted. It is no longer about whether people are using AI. It is about whether your institution has a plan. If your department does not have a policy, this survey is the data point to bring to your chair.

Claude Found 22 Security Vulnerabilities in Firefox in Two Weeks

Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.6 worked alongside Mozilla's engineering team for two weeks and identified 22 vulnerabilities in the Firefox codebase. Fourteen of those were rated high-severity. The AI did not replace the engineers. It worked with them. This is the clearest public demonstration yet of agentic AI doing real professional technical work alongside humans.

Why it matters for your campus. If you teach computer science, cybersecurity, or software engineering, your curriculum needs to address this. Agentic AI is already doing work that used to take teams of humans weeks to complete. That changes what you are preparing students to do.

ChatGPT Now Works Inside Excel

OpenAI launched a beta add-in that brings ChatGPT directly into Microsoft Excel. The tool writes formulas in plain language and can pull structured data from sources including Moody's financial data. You describe what you need. Excel does the work. The add-in is in beta and available now for eligible Microsoft accounts.

Why it matters for your campus. Faculty who run quantitative courses, manage research budgets, or work with institutional data now have a tool that removes the formula barrier. This is worth testing before you recommend it to students.

autoresearch by Andrej Karpathy

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