openai

Three big OpenAI news items this week were the FT article describing the cutting of corners on safety testing, the OpenAI former employee amicus brief, and Altman’s very good TED Interview.

The FT detailed OpenAI’s recent dramatic cutting back on the time and resources allocated to safety testing of its models.

In the interview, Chris Anderson made an unusually strong effort to ask good questions and push through attempts to dodge answering. Altman did a mix of giving a lot of substantive content in some places while dodging answering in others. Where he chose to do which was, itself, enlightening. I felt I learned a lot about where his head is at and how he thinks about key questions now.

The amicus brief backed up that OpenAI’s current actions are in contradiction to the statements OpenAI made to its early employees.

There are also a few other related developments.

What this post does not cover is GPT-4.1. I’m waiting on that until people have a bit more time to try it and offer their reactions, but expect coverage later this week.

The big headline from TED was presumably the increase in OpenAI’s GPU use.

Steve Jurvetson: Sam Altman at TED today: OpenAI’s user base doubled in just the past few weeks (an accidental disclosure on stage). “10% of the world now uses our systems a lot.”

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When asked how many users they have: “Last we disclosed, we have 500 million weekly active users, growing fast.”

Chris Anderson: “But backstage, you told me that it doubled in just a few weeks.” @SamA: “I said that privately.”

And that’s how we got the update.

Revealing that private info wasn’t okay but it seems it was an accident, in any case Altman seemed fine with it.

Listening to the details, it seems that Altman was referring not to the growth in users, but instead to the growth in compute use. Image generation takes a ton of compute.

Altman says every day he calls people up and begs them for GPUs, and that DeepSeek did not impact this at all.

Steve Jurvetson: Sam Altman at TED today:

Reflecting on the life ahead for his newborn: “My kids will never be smarter than AI.”

Reaction to DeepSeek:

“We had a meeting last night on our open source policy. We are going to do a powerful open-source model near the frontier. We were late to act, but we are going to do really well now.”

Altman doesn’t explain here why he is doing an open model. The next question from Anderson seems to explain it, that it’s about whether people ‘recognize’ that OpenAI’s model is best? Later Altman does attempt to justify it with, essentially, a shrug that things will go wrong but we now know it’s probably mostly fine.

Regarding the accumulated knowledge OpenAI gains from its usage history: “The upload happens bit by bit. It is an extension of yourself, and a companion, and soon will proactively push things to you.”

Have there been any scary moments?

“No. There have been moments of awe. And questions of how far this will go. But we are not sitting on a conscious model capable of self-improvement.”

I listened to the clip and this scary moment question specifically refers to capabilities of new models, so it isn’t trivially false. It still damn well should be false, given what their models can do and the leaps and awe involved. The failure to be scared here is a skill issue that exists between keyboard and chair.

How do you define AGI? “If you ask 10 OpenAI engineers, you will get 14 different definitions. Whichever you choose, it is clear that we will go way past that. They are points along an unbelievable exponential curve.”

So AGI will come and your life won’t change, but we will then soon get ASI. Got it.

“Agentic AI is the most interesting and consequential safety problem we have faced. It has much higher stakes. People want to use agents they can trust.”

Sounds like an admission that they’re not ‘facing’ the most interesting or consequential safety problems at all, at least not yet? Which is somewhat confirmed by discussion later in the interview.

I do agree that agents will require a much higher level of robustness and safety, and I’d rather have a ‘relatively dumb’ agent that was robust and safe, for most purposes.

When asked about his Congressional testimony calling for a new agency to issue licenses for large model builders: “I have since learned more about how government works, and I no longer think this is the right framework.”

I do appreciate the walkback being explicit here. I don’t think that’s the reason why.

“Having a kid changed a lot of things in me. It has been the most amazing thing ever. Paraphrasing my co-founder Ilya, I don’t know what the meaning of life is, but I am sure it has something to do with babies.”

Statements like this are always good to see.

“We made a change recently. With our new image model, we are much less restrictive on speech harms. We had hard guardrails before, and we have taken a much more permissive stance. We heard the feedback that people don’t want censorship, and that is a fair safety discussion to have.”

I agree with the change and the discussion, and as I’ve discussed before if anything I’d like to see this taken further with respect to these styles of concern in particular.

Altman is asked about copyright violation, says we need a new model around the economics of creative output and that ‘people build off each others creativity all the time’ and giving creators tools has always been good. Chris Anderson tries repeatedly to nail down the question of consent and compensation. Altman repeatedly refuses to give a straight answer to the central questions.

Altman says (10: 30) that the models are so smart that, for most things people want to do with them, they’re good enough. He notes that this is true based on user expectations, but that’s mostly circular. As in, we ask the models to do what they are capable of doing, the same way we design jobs and hire humans for them based on what things particular humans and people in general can and cannot do. It doesn’t mean any of us are ‘smart enough.’

Nor does it imply what he says next, that everyone will ‘have great models’ but what will differentiate will be not the best model but the best product. I get that productization will matter a lot for which AI gets the job in many cases, but continue to think this ‘AGI is fungible’ claim is rather bonkers crazy.

A key series of moments start at 35: 00 in. It’s telling that other coverage of the interview sidestepped all of this, essentially entirely.

Anderson has put up an image of The Ring of Power, to talk about Elon Musk’s claim that Altman has been corrupted by The Ring, a claim Anderson correctly notes also plausibly applies to Elon Musk.

Altman goes for the ultimate power move. He is defiant and says, all right, you think that, tell me examples. What have I done?

So, since Altman asked so nicely, what are the most prominent examples of Altman potentially being corrupted by The Ring of Power? Here is an eightfold path.

1. We obviously start with Elon Musk’s true objection, which stems from the shift of OpenAI from a non-profit structure to a hybrid structure, and the attempt to now go full for-profit, in ways he claims broke covenants with Elon Musk. Altman claimed to have no equity and not be in this for money, and now is slated to get a lot of equity. I do agree with Anderson that Altman isn’t ‘in it for the money’ because I think Altman correctly noticed the money mostly isn’t relevant.

2. Altman is attempting to do so via outright theft of a huge portion of the non-profit’s assets, then turn what remains into essentially an OpenAI marketing and sales department. This would arguably be the second biggest theft in history.

3. Altman said for years that it was important the board could fire him. Then, when the board did fire him in response (among other things) to Altman lying to the board in an attempt to fire a board member, he led a rebellion against the board, threatened to blow up the entire company and reformulate it at Microsoft, and proved that no, the board cannot fire Altman. Altman can and did fire the board.

4. Altman, after proving he cannot be fired, de facto purged OpenAI of his enemies. Most of the most senior people at OpenAI who are worried about AI existential risk, one by one, reached the conclusion they couldn’t do much on the inside, and resigned to continue their efforts elsewhere.

5. Altman used to talk openly and explicitly about AI existential risks, including attempting to do so before Congress. Now, he talks as if such risks don’t exist, and instead pivots to jingoism and the need to Beat China, and hiring lobbyists who do the same. He promised 20% of compute to the superalignment team, never delivered and then dissolved the team.

6. Altman pledged that OpenAI would support regulation of AI. Now he says he has changed his mind, and OpenAI lobbies against bills like SB 1047 and its AI Action Plan is vice signaling that not only opposes any regulations but seeks government handouts, the right to use intellectual property without compensation and protection against potential regulations.

7. Altman has been cutting corners on safety, as noted elsewhere in this post. OpenAI used to be remarkably good in terms of precautions. Now it’s not.

8. Altman has been going around saying ‘AGI will arrive and your life will not much change’ when it is common knowledge that this is absurd.

One could go on. This is what we like to call a target rich environment.

Anderson offers only #1, the transition to a for-profit model and the most prominent example, which is the most obvious response, but he proactively pulls the punch. Altman admits he’s not the same person he was and that it all happens gradually, if it happened all at once it would be jarring, but says he doesn’t feel any different.

Anderson essentially says okay and pivots to Altman’s son and how that has shaped Altman, which is indeed great. And then he does something that impressed me, which is tie this to existential risk via metaphor, asking if there was a button that was 90% to give his son a wonderful life and 10% to kill him (I’d love those odds!), would he press the button? Altman says literally no, but points out the metaphor, and says he doesn’t think OpenAI is doing that. He says he really cared about not destroying the world before, and he really cares about it now, he didn’t need a kid for that part.

Anderson then moves to the question of racing, and whether the fact that everyone thinks AGI is inevitable is what is creating the risk, asking if Altman and his colleagues believe it is inevitable and asks if maybe they could coordinate to ‘slow down a bit’ and get societal feedback.

As much as I would like that, given the current political climate I worry this sets up a false dichotomy, whereas right now there is tons of room to take more responsibility and get societal feedback, not only without slowing us down but enabling more and better diffusion and adaptation. Anderson seems to want a slowdown for its own sake, to give people time to adapt, which I don’t think is compelling.

Altman points out we slow down all the time for lack of reliability, also points out OpenAI has a track record of their rollouts working, and claims everyone involved ‘cares deeply’ about AI safety. Does he simply mean mundane (short term) safety here?

His discussion of the ‘safety negotiation’ around image generation, where I support OpenAI’s loosening of restrictions, suggests that this is correct. So does the next answer: Anderson asks if Altman would attend a conference of experts to discuss safety, Altman says of course but he’s more interested in what users think as a whole, and ‘asking everyone what they want’ is better than asking people ‘who are blessed by society to sit in a room and make these decisions.’

But that’s an absurd characterization of trying to solve an extremely difficult technical problem. So it implies that Altman thinks the technical problems are easy? Or that he’s trying to rhetorically get you to ignore them, in favor of the question of preferences and an appeal to some form of democratic values and opposition to ‘elites.’ It works as an applause line. Anderson points out that the hundreds of millions ‘don’t always know where the next step leads’ which may be the understatement of the lightcone in this context. Altman says the AI can ‘help us be wiser’ about those decisions, which of course would mean that a sufficiently capable AI or whoever directs it would de facto be making the decisions for us.

OpenAI’s Altman ‘Won’t Rule Out’ Helping Pentagon on AI Weapons, but doesn’t expect to develop a new weapons platform ‘in the foreseeable future,’ which is a period of time that gets shorter each time I type it.

Altman: I will never say never, because the world could get really weird.

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I don’t think most of the world wants AI making weapons decisions.

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I don’t think AI adoption in the government has been as robust as possible.

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There will be “exceptionally smart” AI systems by the end of next year.

I think I can indeed forsee the future where OpenAI is helping the Pentagon with its AI weapons. I expect this to happen.

I want to be clear that I don’t think this is a bad thing. The risk is in developing highly capable AIs in the first place. As I have said before, Autonomous Killer Robots and AI-assisted weapons in general are not how we lose control over the future to AI, and failing to do so is a key way America can fall behind. It’s not like our rivals are going to hold back.

To the extent that the AI weapons scare the hell out of everyone? That’s a feature.

On the issue of the attempt to sideline and steal from the nonprofit, 11 former OpenAI employees filed an amicus brief in the Musk vs. Altman lawsuit, on the side of Musk.

Todor Markov: Today, myself and 11 other former OpenAI employees filed an amicus brief in the Musk v Altman case.

We worked at OpenAI; we know the promises it was founded on and we’re worried that in the conversion those promises will be broken. The nonprofit needs to retain control of the for-profit. This has nothing to do with Elon Musk and everything to do with the public interest.

OpenAI claims ‘the nonprofit isn’t going anywhere’ but has yet to address the critical question: Will the nonprofit actually retain control over the for-profit? This distinction matters.

You can find the full amicus here.

On this question, Timothy Lee points out that you don’t need to care about existential risk to notice that what OpenAI is trying to do to its non-profit is highly not cool.

Timothy Lee: I don’t think people’s views on the OpenAI case should have anything to do with your substantive views on existential risk. The case is about two questions: what promises did OpenAI make to early donors, and are those promises legally enforceable?

A lot of people on OpenAI’s side seem to be taking the view that non-profit status is meaningless and therefore donors shouldn’t complain if they get scammed by non-profit leaders. Which I personally find kind of gross.

I mean I would be pretty pissed if I gave money to a non-profit promising to do one thing and then found out they actually did something different that happened to make their leaders fabulously wealthy.

This particular case comes down to that. A different case, filed by the Attorney General, would also be able to ask the more fundamental question of whether fair compensation is being offered for assets, and whether the charitable purpose of the nonprofit is going to be wiped out, or even pivoted into essentially a profit center for OpenAI’s business (as in buying a bunch of OpenAI services for nonprofits and calling that its de facto charitable purpose).

The mad dash to be first, and give the perception that the company is ‘winning’ is causing reckless rushes to release new models at OpenAI.

This is in dramatic contrast to when there was less risk in the room, and despite this OpenAI used to take many months to prepare a new release. At first, by any practical standard, OpenAI’s track record on actual model release decisions was amazingly great. Nowadays? Not so much.

Would their new procedures pot the problems it is vital that we spot in advance?

Joe Weisenthal: I don’t have any views on whether “AI Safety” is actually an important endeavor.

But if it is important, it’s clear that the intensity of global competition in the AI space (DeepSeek etc.) will guarantee it increasingly gets thrown out the window.

Christina Criddle: EXC: OpenAI has reduced the time for safety testing amid “competitive pressures” per sources:

Timeframes have gone from months to days

Specialist work such as finetuning for misuse (eg biorisk) has been limited

Evaluations are conducted on earlier versions than launched

Financial Times (Gated): OpenAI has slashed the time and resources it spends on testing the safety of its powerful AI models, raising concerns that its technology is being rushed out the door without sufficient safeguards.

Staff and third-party groups have recently been given just days to conduct “evaluations,” the term given to tests for assessing models’ risks and performance, on OpenAI’s latest LLMs, compared to several months previously.

According to eight people familiar with OpenAI’s testing processes, the start-up’s tests have become less thorough, with insufficient time and resources dedicated to identifying and mitigating risks, as the $300 billion startup comes under pressure to release new models quickly and retain its competitive edge.

Steven Adler (includes screenshots from FT): Skimping on safety-testing is a real bummer. I want for OpenAI to become the “leading model of how to address frontier risk” they’ve aimed to be.

Peter Wildeford: I can see why people say @sama is not consistently candid.

Dylan Hadfield Menell: I remember talking about competitive pressures and race conditions with the @OpenAI’s safety team in 2018 when I was an intern. It was part of a larger conversation about the company charter.

It is sad to see @OpenAI’s founding principles cave to pressures we predicted long ago.

It is sad, but not surprising.

This is why we need a robust community working on regulating the next generation of AI systems. Competitive pressure is real.

We need people in positions of genuine power that are shielded from them.

Peter Wildeford:

Dylan Hadfield Menell: Where did you find an exact transcription of our conversation?!?!

You can’t do this kind of testing properly in a matter of days. It’s impossible.

If people don’t have time to think let alone adapt, probe and build tools, how they can see what your new model is capable of doing? There are some great people working on these issues at OpenAI but this is an impossible ask.

Testing on a version that doesn’t even match what you release? That’s even more impossible.

Part of this is that it is so tragic how everyone massively misinterpreted and overreacted to DeepSeek.

To reiterate since the perception problem persists, yes, DeepSeek cooked, they have cracked engineers and they did a very impressive thing with r1 given what they spent and where they were starting from, but that was not DS being ‘in the lead’ or even at the frontier, they were always many months behind and their relative costs were being understated by multiple orders of magnitude. Even today I saw someone say ‘DeepSeek still in the lead’ when this is so obviously not the case. Meanwhile, no one was aware Google Flash Thinking even existed, or had the first visible CoT, and so on.

The result of all that? Talk similar to Kennedy’s ‘Missile Gap,’ abject panic, and sudden pressure to move up releases to show OpenAI and America have ‘still got it.’

Back when the OpenAI board attempted and failed to fire Sam Altman, we faced a highly hostile information environment. The battle was fought largely through control of the public narrative, and the above was my attempt to put together what happened.

My conclusion, which I still believe, was that Sam Altman had engaged in a variety of unacceptable conduct that merited his firing.

In particular, he very much ‘not been consistently candid’ with the board on several important occasions. In particular, he lied to board members about what was said by other board members, with the goal of forcing out a board member he disliked. There were also other instances in which he misled and was otherwise toxic to employees, and he played fast and loose with the investment fund and other outside opportunities.

I concluded that the story that this was about ‘AI safety’ or ‘EA (effective altruism)’ or existential risk concerns, other than as Altman’s motivation to attempt to remove board members, was a false narrative largely spread by Altman’s allies and those who are determined to hate on anyone who is concerned future AI might get out of control or kill everyone, often using EA’s bad press or vibes as a point of leverage to do that.

A few weeks later, I felt that leaks confirmed the bulk the story I told at that first link, and since then I’ve had anonymous sources confirm my account was centrally true.

Thanks to Keach Hagey at the Wall Street Journal, we now have by far the most well-researched and complete piece on what happened: The Secrets and Misdirection Behind Sam Altman’s Firing From OpenAI. Most, although not all, of the important remaining questions are now definitively answered, and the story I put together has been confirmed.

The key now is to Focus Only On What Matters. What matters going forward are:

1. Claims of Altman’s toxic and dishonest behaviors, that if true merited his firing.

2. That the motivations behind the firing were these ordinary CEO misbehaviors.

3. Altman’s allies successfully spread a highly false narrative about events.

4. That OpenAI could easily have moved forward with a different CEO, if things had played out differently and Altman had not threatened to blow up OpenAI.

5. OpenAI is now effectively controlled by Sam Altman going forward. His claims that ‘the board can fire me’ in practice mean very little.

Also important is what happened afterwards, which was likely caused in large part by both the events and also way they were framed, and also Altman’s consolidated power.

In particular, Sam Altman and OpenAI, whose explicit mission is building AGI and who plan to do so within Trump’s second term, started increasingly talking and acting like AGI was No Big Deal, except for the amazing particular benefits.

Their statements don’t feel the AGI. They no longer tell us our lives will change that much. It is not important, they do not even bother to tell us, to protect against key downside risks of building machines smarter and more capable than humans – such as the risk that those machines effectively take over, or perhaps end up killing everyone.

And if you disagreed with that, or opposed Sam Altman? You were shown the door.

6. OpenAI was then effectively purged. Most of its strongest alignment researchers left, as did most of those who most prominently wanted to take care to ensure OpenAI’s quest for AGI did not kill everyone or cause humanity to lose control over the future.

7. Altman’s public statements about AGI, and OpenAI’s policy positions, stopped even mentioning the most important downside risks of AGI and ASI (artificial superintelligence), and shifted towards attempts at regulatory capture and access to government cooperation and funding. Most prominently, their statement on the US AI Action Plan can only be described as disingenuous vice signaling in pursuit of their own private interests.

8. Those public statements and positions no longer much even ‘feel the AGI.’ Altman has taken to predicting that AGI will happen and your life won’t much change, and treating future AGI as essentially a fungible good. We know, from his prior statements, that Altman knows better. And we know from their current statements that many the engineers at OpenAI know better. Indeed, in context, they shout it from the rooftops.

9. We discovered that self-hiding NDAs were aggressively used by OpenAI, under threat of equity confiscation, to control people and the narrative.

10. With control over the board, Altman is attempting to convert OpenAI into a for-profit company, with sufficiently low compensation that this act could plausibly become the greatest theft in human history.

Beware being distracted by the shiny. In particular:

1. Don’t be distracted by the article’s ‘cold open’ in which Peter Thiel tells a paranoid and false story to Sam Altman, in which Thiel asserts that ‘EAs’ or ‘safety’ people will attempt to destroy OpenAI, and that they have ‘half the company convinced’ and so on. I don’t doubt the interaction happened, but this was unrelated to what happened.

   1. To the extent it was related, it was because Altman and his allies paranoia about such possibilities, inspired by such tall tales, caused Altman to lie to the board in general, and attempt to force Helen Toner off the board in particular.

2. Don’t be distracted by the fact that the board botched the firing, and the subsequent events, from a tactical perspective. Yes we can learn from their mistakes, but the board that made those mistakes is gone now.

This is all quite bad, but things could be far worse. OpenAI still has many excellent people working on alignment, security and safety. I They have put out a number of strong documents. By that standard, and in terms of how responsibly they have actually handled their releases, OpenAI has outperformed many other industry actors, although less responsible than Anthropic. Companies like DeepSeek, Meta and xAI, and at times Google, work hard to make OpenAI look good on these fronts.

Now, on to what we learned this week.

Hagey’s story paints a clear picture of what actually happened.

It is especially clear about why this happened. The firing wasn’t about EA, ‘the safety people’ or existential risk. What was this about?

Altman repeatedly lied to, misled and mistreated employees of OpenAI. Altman repeatedly lied about and withheld factual and importantly material matters, including directly to the board. There was a large litany of complaints.

The big new fact is that the board was counting on Murati’s support. But partly because of this, they felt they couldn’t disclose that their information came largely from Murati. That doesn’t explain why they couldn’t say this to Murati herself.

If the facts asserted in the WSJ article are true, I would say that any responsible board would have voted for Altman’s removal. As OpenAI’s products got more impactful, and the stakes got higher, Altman’s behaviors left no choice.

Claude agreed, this was one shot, I pasted in the full article and asked:

Zvi: I’ve shared a news article. Based on what is stated in the news article, if the reporting is accurate, how would you characterize the board’s decision to fire Altman? Was it justified? Was it necessary?

Claude 3.7: Based on what’s stated in the article, the board’s decision to fire Sam Altman appears both justified and necessary from their perspective, though clearly poorly executed in terms of preparation and communication.

I agree, on both counts. There are only two choices here, at least one must be true:

1. The board had a fiduciary duty to fire Altman.

2. The board members are outright lying about what happened.

That doesn’t excuse the board’s botched execution, especially its failure to disclose information in a timely manner.

The key facts cited here are:

1. Altman said publicly and repeatedly ‘the board can fire me. That’s important’ but he really called the shots and did everything in his power to ensure this.

2. Altman did not even inform the board about ChatGPT in advance, at all.

3. Altman explicitly claimed three enhancements to GPT-4 had been approved by the joint safety board. Helen Toner found only one had been approved.

4. Altman allowed Microsoft to launch the test of GPT-4 in India, in the form of Sydney, without the approval of the safety board or informing the board of directors of the breach. Due to the results of that experiment entering the training data, deploying Sydney plausibly had permanent effects on all future AIs. This was not a trivial oversight.

5. Altman did not inform the board that he had taken financial ownership of the OpenAI investment fund, which he claimed was temporary and for tax reasons.

6. Mira Murati came to the board with a litany of complaints about what she saw as Altman’s toxic management style, including having Brockman, who reported to her, go around her to Altman whenever there was a disagreement. Altman responded by bringing the head of HR to their 1-on-1s until Mira said she wouldn’t share her feedback with the board.

7. Altman promised both Pachocki and Sutskever they could direct the research direction of the company, losing months of productivity, and this was when Sutskever started looking to replace Altman.

8. The most egregious lie (Hagey’s term for it) and what I consider on its own sufficient to require Altman be fired: Altman told one board member, Sutskever, that a second board member, McCauley, had said that Toner should leave the board because of an article Toner wrote. McCauley said no such thing. This was an attempt to get Toner removed from the board. If you lie to board members about other board members in an attempt to gain control over the board, I assert that the board should fire you, pretty much no matter what.

9. Sutskever collected dozens of examples of alleged Altman lies and other toxic behavior, largely backed up by screenshots from Murati’s Slack channel. One lie in particular was that Altman told Murati that the legal department had said GPT-4-Turbo didn’t have to go through joint safety board review. The head lawyer said he did not say that. The decision not to go through the safety board here was not crazy, but lying about the lawyers opinion on this is highly unacceptable.

Murati was clearly a key source for many of these firing offenses (and presumably for this article, given its content and timing, although I don’t know anything nonpublic). Despite this, even after Altman was fired, the board didn’t even tell Murati why they had fired him while asking her to become interim CEO, and in general stayed quiet largely (in this post’s narrative) to protect Murati. But then, largely because of the board’s communication failures, Murati turned on the board and the employees backed Altman.

This section reiterates and expands on my warnings above.

The important narrative here is that Altman engaged in various shenanigans and made various unforced errors that together rightfully got him fired. But the board botched the execution, and Altman was willing to burn down OpenAI in response and the board wasn’t. Thus, Altman got power back and did an ideological purge.

The first key distracting narrative, the one I’m seeing many fall into, is to treat this primarily as a story about board incompetence. Look at those losers, who lost, because they were stupid losers in over their heads with no business playing at this level. Many people seem to think the ‘real story’ is that a now defunct group of people were bad at corporate politics and should get mocked.

Yes, that group was bad at corporate politics. We should update on that, and be sure that the next time we have to Do Corporate Politics we don’t act like that, and especially that we explain why we we doing things. But the group that dropped this ball is defunct, whereas Altman is still CEO. And this is not a sporting event.

The board is now irrelevant. Altman isn’t. What matters is the behavior of Altman, and what he did to earn getting fired. Don’t be distracted by the shiny.

A second key narrative spun by Altman’s allies is that Altman is an excellent player of corporate politics. He has certainly pulled off some rather impressive (and some would say nasty) tricks. But the picture painted here is rife with unforced errors. Altman won because the opposition played badly, not because he played so well.

Most importantly, as I noted at the time, the board started out with nine members, five of whom at the time were loyal to Altman even if you don’t count Ilya Sutskever. Altman could easily have used this opportunity to elect new loyal board members. Instead, he allowed three of his allies to leave the board without replacement, leading to the deadlock of control, which then led to the power struggle. Given Altman knows so many well-qualified allies, this seems like a truly epic level of incompetence to me.

The third other key narrative is the one Altman’s allies have centrally told since day one, which is entirely false, is that this firing (which they misleadingly call a ‘coup’) was ‘the safety people’ or ‘the EAs’ trying to ‘destroy’ OpenAI.

My worry is that many will see that this false framing is presented early in the post, and not read far enough to realize the post is pointing out that the framing is entirely false. Thus, many or even most readers might get exactly the wrong idea.

In particular, this piece opens with an irrelevant story ecoching this false narrative. Peter Thiel is at dinner telling his friend Sam Altman a frankly false and paranoid story about Effective Altruism and Eliezer Yudkowsky.

Thiel says that ‘half the company believes this stuff’ (if only!) and that ‘the EAs’ had ‘taken over’ OpenAI (if only again!), and predicting that ‘the safety people,’ who on various occasions Thiel has described as literally and at length as the biblical Antichrist would ‘destroy’ OpenAI (whereas, instead, the board in the end fell on its sword to prevent Altman and his allies from destroying OpenAI).

And it gets presented in ways like this:

We are told to focus on the nice people eating dinner while other dastardly people held ‘secret video meetings.’ How is this what is important here?

Then if you keep reading, Hagey makes it clear: The board’s firing of Altman had nothing to do with that. And we get on with the actual excellent article.

I don’t doubt Thiel told that to Altman, and I find it likely Thiel even believed it. The thing is, it isn’t true, and it’s rather important that people know it isn’t true.

If you want to read more about what has happened at OpenAI, I have covered this extensively, and my posts contain links to the best primary and other secondary sources I could find. Here are the posts in this sequence.

1. OpenAI: Facts From a Weekend.

2. OpenAI: The Battle of the Board.

3. OpenAI: Altman Returns.

4. OpenAI: Leaks Confirm the Story.

5. OpenAI: The Board Expands.

6. OpenAI: Exodus.

7. OpenAI: Fallout

8. OpenAI: Helen Toner Speaks.

9. OpenAI #8: The Right to Warn.

10. OpenAI #10: Reflections.

11. On the OpenAI Economic Blueprint.

12. The Mask Comes Off: At What Price?

13. OpenAI #11: America Action Plan.

The write-ups will doubtless continue, as this is one of the most important companies in the world.

Last week I covered Anthropic’s submission to the request for suggestions for America’s action plan. I did not love what they submitted, and especially disliked how aggressively they sidelines existential risk and related issues, but given a decision to massively scale back ambition like that the suggestions were, as I called them, a ‘least you can do’ agenda, with many thoughtful details.

OpenAI took a different approach. They went full jingoism in the first paragraph, framing this as a race in which we must prevail over the CCP, and kept going. A lot of space is spent on what a kind person would call rhetoric and an unkind person corporate jingoistic propaganda.

Their goal is to have the Federal Government not only not regulate AI or impose any requirements on AI whatsoever on any level, but also prevent the states from doing so, and ensure that existing regulations do not apply to them, seeking ‘relief’ from proposed bills, including exemption from all liability, explicitly emphasizing immunity from regulations targeting frontier models in particular and name checking SB 1047 as an example of what they want immunity from, all in the name of ‘Freedom to Innovate,’ warning of undermining America’s leadership position otherwise.

None of which actually makes any sense from a legal perspective, that’s not how any of this works, but that’s clearly not what they decided to care about. If this part was intended as a serious policy proposal it would have tried to pretend to be that. Instead it’s a completely incoherent proposal, that goes halfway towards something unbelievably radical but pulls back from trying to implement it.

Meanwhile, they want the United States to not only ban Chinese ‘AI infrastructure’ but also coordinate with other countries to ban it, and they want to weaken the compute diffusion rules for those who cooperate with this, essentially only restricting countries with a history or expectation of leaking technology to China, or those who won’t play ball with OpenAI’s anticompetitive proposals.

They refer to DeepSeek as ‘state controlled.’

They claim that DeepSeek could be ordered to alter its models to cause harm, if one were to build upon them, seems to fundamentally misunderstand that DeepSeek is releasing open models. You can’t modify an open model like that. Nor can you steal someone’s data if they’re running their own copy. The parallel to Huawei is disingenuous at best, especially given the source.

They cite the ‘Belt and Road Initiative’ and claim to expect China to coerce people into using DeepSeek’s models.

For copyright they proclaim the need for ‘freedom to learn’ and asserts that AI training is fully fair use and immune from copyright. I think this is a defensible position, and myself support mandatory licensing similar to radio for music, in a way that compensates creators. I think the position here is defensible. But the rhetoric?

They all but declare that if we don’t apply fair use, the authoritarians will conquer us.

If the PRC’s developers have unfettered access to data and American companies are left without fair use access, the race for AI is effectively over. America loses, as does the success of democratic AI.

It amazes me they wrote that with a straight face. Everything is power laws. Suggesting that depriving American labs of some percentage of data inputs, even if that were to happen and the labs were to honor those restrictions (which I very much do not believe they have typically been doing), would mean ‘the race is effectively over’ is patently absurd. They know that better than anyone. Have they no shame? Are they intentionally trying to tell us that they have no shame? Why?

This document is written in a way that seems almost designed to make one vomit. This is vice signaling. As I have said before, and with OpenAI documents this has happened before, when that happens, I think it is important to notice it!

I don’t think the inducing of vomit is a coincidence. They chose to write it this way. They want people to see that they are touting disingenuous jingoistic propaganda in a way that seems suspiciously corrupt. Why would they want to signal that? You tell me.

You don’t publish something like this unless you actively want headlines like this:

Evan Morrison: Altman translated – if you don’t give Open AI free access to steal all copyrighted material by writers, musicians and filmmakers without legal repercussions then we will lose the AI race with China – a communist nation which nonetheless protects the copyright of individuals.

There are other similar and similarly motivated claims throughout.

The claim that China can circumvent some regulatory restrictions present in America is true enough, and yes that constitutes an advantage that could be critical if we do EU-style things, but the way they frame it goes beyond hyperbolic. Every industry, everywhere, would like to say ‘any requirements you place upon me make our lives harder and helps our competitors, so you need to place no restrictions on us of any kind.’

Then there’s a mix of proposals, some of which are good, presented reasonably:

Their proposal for a ‘National Transmission Highway Act’ on par with the 1956 National Interstate and Defense Highways Act seems like it should be overkill, but our regulations in these areas are deeply fed, so if as they suggest here it is focused purely on approvals I am all for that one. They also want piles of government money.

Similarly their idea of AI ‘Opportunity Zones’ is great if it only includes sidestepping permitting and various regulations. The tax incentives or ‘credit enhancements’ I see as an unnecessary handout, private industry is happy to make these investments if we clear the way.

The exception is semiconductor manufacturing, where we do need to provide the right incentives, so we will need to pay up.

Note that OpenAI emphasizes the need for solar and wind projects on top of other energy sources.

Digitization of government data currently in analog form is a great idea, we should do it for many overdetermined reasons. But to point out the obvious, are we then going to hide that data from PRC? It’s not an advantage to American AI companies if everyone gets equal access.

The Compact for AI proposal is vague but directionally seems good.

Their ‘national AI Readiness Strategy’ is part of a long line of ‘retraining’ style government initiatives that, frankly, don’t work, and also aren’t necessary here. I’m fine with expanding 529 savings plans to cover AI supply chain-related training programs, I mean sure why not, but don’t try to do much more than that. The private sector is far better equipped to handle this one, especially with AI help.

I don’t get the ‘creating AI research labs’ strategy here, it seems to be a tax on AI companies payable to universities? This doesn’t actually make economic sense at all.

The section on Government Adaptation of AI is conceptually fine, but the emphasis on private-public partnerships is telling.

Some others are even hasher than I was. Andrew Curran has similar even blunter thoughts on both of the DeepSeek and fair use rhetorical moves.

Alexander Doria: The main reason OpenAI is calling to reinforce fair use for model training: their new models directly compete with writers, journalists, wikipedia editors. We have deep research (a “wikipedia killer”, ditto Noam Brown) and now the creative writing model.

The fundamental doctrine behind the google books transformative exception: you don’t impede on the normal commercialization of the work used. No longer really the case…

We have models trained exclusively on open data.

Gallabytes (on the attempt to ban Chinese AI models): longshoremen level scummy move. @OpenAI this is disgraceful.

As we should have learned many times in the past, most famously with the Jones Act, banning the competition is not The Way. You don’t help your industry compete, you instead risk destroying your industry’s ability to compete.

This week, we saw for example that Saudi Aramco chief says DeepSeek AI makes ‘big difference’ to operations. The correct response is to say, hey, have you tried Claude and ChatGPT, or if you need open models have you tried Gemma? Let’s turn that into a reasoning model for you.

The response that says you’re ngmi? Trying to ban DeepSeek, or saying if you don’t get exemptions from laws then ‘the race is over.’

From Peter Wildeford, seems about right:

The best steelman of OpenAI’s response I’ve seen comes from John Pressman. His argument is, yes there is cringe here – he chooses to focus here on a line about DeepSeek’s willingness to do a variety of illicit activities and a claim that this reflects CCP’s view of violating American IP law. Which is certainly another cringy line. But, he points out, the Trump administration asked how America can get ahead and stay ahead in AI, so in that context why shouldn’t OpenAI respond with a jingoistic move towards regulatory capture and a free pass to do as they want?

And yes, there is that, although his comments also reinforce that the price in ‘gesture towards open model support’ for some people to cheer untold other horrors is remarkably cheap.

This letter is part of a recurring pattern in OpenAI’s public communications.

OpenAI have issued some very good documents on the alignment and technical fronts, including their model spec and statement on alignment philosophy, as well as their recent paper on The Most Forbidden Technique. They have been welcoming of detailed feedback on those fronts. In these places they are being thoughtful and transparent, and doing some good work, and I have updated positively. OpenAI’s actual model deployment decisions have mostly been fine in practice, with some troubling signs such as the attempt to pretend GPT-4.5 was not a frontier model.

Alas, their public relations and lobbying departments, and Altman’s public statements in various places, have been consistently terrible and getting even worse over time, to the point of being consistent and rather blatant vice signaling. OpenAI is intentionally presenting themselves as disingenuous jingoistic villains, seeking out active regulatory protections, doing their best to kill attempts to keep models secure, and attempting various forms of government subsidy and regulatory capture.

I get why they would think it is strategically wise to present themselves in this way, to appeal to both the current government and to investors, especially in the wake of recent ‘vibe shifts.’ So I get why one could be tempted to say, oh, they don’t actually believe any of this, they’re only being strategic, obviously not enough people will penalize them for it so they need to do it, and thus you shouldn’t penalize them for it either, that would only be spite.

I disagree. When people tell you who they are, you should believe them.