Paranoia is as natural to Silicon Valley as lip fillers are to Los Angeles. In the Bay Area, you can't throw a rock without hitting a startup founder convinced everyone is out to steal his ideas or poach his staff — a state of mind reaffirmed by the fact that sometimes, people very much are trying to rip off their competitors.
Until the last few years, OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman, seemed above that fracas. Altman's sanguine predictions about artificial general intelligence (AGI), a benchmark at which AI reaches would human smarts, didn't feel like a money grab — his company was a nonprofit dedicated to building AGI safely, and making money was beside the point.
But that relaxed buoyancy is long gone. In its wake has come a frenzied attempt by OpenAI to abandon its nonprofit status and become a for-profit entity to keep up with the costs of funding its ever-growing AI kingdom. Such a massive about-face was bound to bring opponents large and small out of the woodwork, from ousted OpenAI founder Elon Musk to California legislators and AI safety advocates.
With their goals as disparate as their backgrounds, these organizations, individuals, and institutions wouldn't be natural bedfellows — but apparently, as the San Francisco Standard reports, Altman and other ranking OpenAI executives have began to think at some point that they all are working together, funded by some murky billionaire antagonists, to bring about the ChatGPT maker's demise.
One of the groups targeted by OpenAI, the AI governance nonprofit Encode, has had a particularly egregious experience dealing with the company's legal might. Speaking with the Standard, Nathan Calvin, the general counsel of the small firm, said he ended up fielding strange calls for multiple days until ultimately, he was served a subpoena from the Altman-run company by a sheriff's deputy in Washington, DC.
"I was just thinking, 'Wow, they're really doing this,'" Calvin told the Standard. "'This is really happening.'"
The reason for the subpoena: Encode had filed an amicus brief in favor of some of Musk's arguments amid his legal feud with OpenAI, which he sued back in 2024 for abandoning its original mission to develop AI for humanity and not financial gain by moving to a for-profit structure. (Musk also mounted a nearly $100 billion takeover of the company earlier, which Altman rejected outright.)
In the filing, OpenAI demanded that Encode release any information it had about Musk's involvement in the founding of the nonprofit and any exchanges the group had had with him and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who was apparently pitched to help Musk with his takeover bid in February.
As Calvin told the Standard, no such documents exist, and no such exchanges occurred. But to OpenAI's increasingly paranoid executives, that seems hardly to matter. At least two other AI safety nonprofits, who were not named in the article, have been served similar documents in recent months, both with a similarly illusory goal: to find the mysterious billionaires funding this disparate cabal as it tries to hamstring OpenAI.
So committed is OpenAI to this wild goose hunt that one of its attorneys, Ann O'Leary, admitted when speaking to the Standard that the company seeks to unmask "funders [who] hold direct equity stakes in competitors," including but not limited to Musk, Zuckerberg, and potentially even Anthropic investors Dustin Moskovitz, the Facebook co-founder, and eBay founder Pierre Omidyar.
"This is about transparency in terms of who funded these organizations," O'Leary told the Standard. "They can engage in all the spin they want, but the one thing they continue to do is duck, dodge, bob, and weave on who is really funding them. That is the more-than-million-dollar question."
If that sounds a little unbalanced to you, you're not alone.
"They’re in this kind of paranoid bubble," Calvin told the Standard. "They’re under siege from Meta, who’s trying to poach their employees, and Elon, who seems genuinely out to get them. I think they're just seeing conspiracies and echoes of their enemies in places where [they aren’t].”
"They seem to have a hard time believing that we are an organization of people who just, like, actually care about this," he continued. The same could well be said of the nonprofit groups that helped write a since-killed California state bill that would have blocked OpenAI's transition to for-profit.
Around the time that the bill was kiboshed this past spring, it appears that OpenAI chose to not only go after those who opposed the transition, but to consider them all as co-conspirators. Though the nonprofits aren't backing down in the face of what may soon become the world's most valuable startup, the fight has clearly taken its toll.
"It’s taxing for a small organization, and me as an individual, to be spending a lot of my time dealing with lawyers and responding to reporters about these allegations that are silly and false," Calvin told the Standard of his time interfacing with OpenAI on behalf of Encode. "Insofar as the goal was to make [our work] harder, I'm not gonna lie and say it didn’t have any success."
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