--- title: "OpenAI Staffers Horrified When Senior Leadership Hatched “Insane” Plan to Pit World Governments Against Each Other" description: "OpenAI leadership discussed a plan to play world powers against each other to drive a bidding war for its AI." date: "2026-04-12" modified: "2026-04-12" authors: - name: "Frank Landymore" job_title: "Contributing Writer" link: "https://futurism.com/authors/flandymore" url: "https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/openai-staffers-horrified-insane-plan" categories: - "Artificial Intelligence" - "OpenAI" --- # OpenAI Staffers Horrified When Senior Leadership Hatched “Insane” Plan to Pit World Governments Against Each Other ![Five green plastic toy soldiers in various combat poses, set against a bright yellow background featuring the OpenAI logo. The soldiers are equipped with different weapons, including rifles, a machine gun, and a bazooka.]() *Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images* OpenAI leaders horrified staffers after proposing an "insane" plan to enrich the company by pitting world governments against each other. This anecdote of near comic-book-villainry comes from *The New Yorker's* [sweeping new investigation]() into CEO Sam Altman, which documents his alarming pattern of lying and manipulating to build his AI empire, a behavior that some insiders [likened to that of an actual "sociopath]()." Altman's second-in-command Greg Brockman features heavily. In 2017, according to the reporting, he hatched a geopolitical scheme which internally came to be known as the "countries plan." Unimpressed by his ethics adviser's suggestion to avoid a nuclear-like arms race by forming an international body to cooperate on AI safety, Brockman openly mused about playing world powers like China and Russia against each other, such as by starting a bidding war for its tech. According to the ethics adviser, Page Hedley, Brockman's logic seemed to be, "It worked for nuclear weapons, why not AI?" "The premise, which they didn't dispute, was 'We're talking about potentially the most destructive technology ever invented — what if we sold it to Putin?'" an exasperated Hedley told *The New Yorker*. OpenAI's then-policy director Jack Clark described it as a "prisoner's dilemma, where all of the nations need to give us funding," and that "implicitly makes not giving us funding kind of dangerous." A junior researcher recalled thinking at the meeting where the plan was discussed that it was "completely f\*cking insane." The plan was eventually dropped months later, after some employees threatened to quit. Of employee dissent, Hedley opined that it "was always something that had more weight in Sam's calculations than 'This is not a good plan because it might cause a war between great powers.'" Altman also tried his hand at manipulating governments — namely, the US. Beginning in 2017, he would repeatedly tell US intelligence officials that China had supposedly launched an "AGI Manhattan Project," referring to artificial general intelligence. For OpenAI and thereby the US to stay on equal footing, his company would need billions of dollars in government money. When officials pressed for a source, Altman replied ambiguously that "I've heard things." One official who looked into the claims concluded that Altman had made it all up: "It was just being used as a sales pitch." Altman, the reporting described, casted himself as an Oppenheimer-like figure. While the driving physicist behind the invention of the atomic bomb used "impassioned appeals about saving the world from the Nazis to persuade physicists to uproot their lives," it wrote, "Altman leverages fears about the geopolitical stakes of his technology." **More on AI:** [*Sam Altman’s Coworkers Say He Can Barely Code and Misunderstands Basic Machine Learning Concepts*]() ## Author At Futurism, my work has often centered on bringing a sense of clarity and insight to complex topics ranging from the regulation of emerging technologies to the esoteric ideologies of Silicon Valley executives, while striving not to lose the poetic sense of awe inspired by often-obscure fields like astrophysics and quantum computing. I broke the story of CNET using AI to produce articles that turned out to be riddled with factual errors and plagiarism — a dam-breaking inflection point, as I've reported, that's inspired copycats and endless discourse while beguiling stakeholders ranging from tech giants to purveyors of spam around the web. My work at Futurism has been cited by publications including CBS News, the Los Angeles Times, Vice, Gizmodo, Engadget, the Verge, and Vanity Fair. I grew up in locales ranging from India to China, and now live in the exotic suburbs of Virginia. In my free time, I'm an avid reader of weird sci-fi literature, an aficionado of East Asian cinema, and, regrettably, a relapsed gamer. Allegedly, I’m working on a debut novel, currently untitled. ### Author social links [Bluesky]()