Former employees of OpenAI are asking the top law enforcement officers in California and Delaware to stop the company from shifting control of its artificial intelligence technology from a nonprofit charity to a for-profit business.
They’re concerned about what happens if the ChatGPT maker fulfills its ambition to build AI that outperforms humans, but is no longer accountable to its public mission to safeguard that technology from causing grievous harms.
“Ultimately, I’m worried about who owns and controls this technology once it’s created,” said Page Hedley, a former policy and ethics adviser at OpenAI, in an interview with The Associated Press.
Backed by three Nobel Prize winners and other advocates and experts, Hedley and nine other ex-OpenAI workers sent a letter this week to the two state attorneys general.
The coalition is asking California Attorney General Rob Bonta and Delaware Attorney General Kathy Jennings, both Democrats, to use their authority to protect OpenAI’s charitable purpose and block its planned restructuring. OpenAI is incorporated in Delaware and operates out of San Francisco.
OpenAI said in response that “any changes to our existing structure would be in service of ensuring the broader public can benefit from AI.” It said its for-profit will be a public benefit corporation, similar to other AI labs like Anthropic and tech billionaire Elon Musk’s xAI, except that OpenAI will still preserve a nonprofit arm.
“This structure will continue to ensure that as the for-profit succeeds and grows, so too does the nonprofit, enabling us to achieve the mission,” the company said in a statement.
The letter is the second petition to state officials this month. The last came from a group of labor leaders and nonprofits focused on protecting OpenAI’s billions of dollars of charitable assets.
Jennings said last fall she would “review any such transaction to ensure that the public’s interests are adequately protected.” Bonta’s office sought more information from OpenAI late last year but has said it can’t comment, even to confirm or deny if it is investigating.
OpenAI’s co-founders, including current CEO Sam Altman and Musk, originally started it as a nonprofit research laboratory on a mission to safely build what’s known as artificial general intelligence, or AGI, for humanity’s benefit. Nearly a decade later, OpenAI has reported its market value as $300 billion and counts 400 million weekly users of ChatGPT, its flagship product.
OpenAI already has a for-profit subsidiary but faces a number of challenges in converting its core governance structure. One is a lawsuit from Musk, who accuses the company and Altman of betraying the founding principles that led the Tesla CEO to invest in the charity.
