OpenAI’s bid to restructure to for-profit status isn’t just rankling embittered company co-founder Elon Musk.
Growing ranks of former employees of the ChatGPT maker, as well as an all-star cast of artificial intelligence (AI) experts, are exhorting the attorneys general of California and Delaware to intervene and put a stop to the change in corporate status, which requires approval from California Attorney General Rob Bonta and Delaware AG Kathy Jennings.
An open letter from more than 30 people — including AI “godfather” and Nobel laureate Geoffrey Hinton and Margaret Mitchell, Hugging Face chief ethics scientist — claims OpenAI’s attempt to buy itself out from under its nonprofit’s control would sidestep governance safeguards and undercut OpenAI’s original mission that artificial general intelligence (AGI) “benefits all of humanity.”
Removing nonprofit control over how AGI is developed and governed would “violate the special fiduciary duty owed to the nonprofit’s beneficiaries” and “pose a palpable and identifiable threat” to OpenAI’s charitable purpose, the letter’s signatories said. They added that a restructuring would undermine the California and Delaware attorneys general’s ability to “protect OpenAI’s beneficiaries: the public.”
The letter, posted on website Not For Private Gain and shared with OpenAI’s nonprofit board, comes two weeks after a dozen ex-workers asked a federal judge for permission to comment on Musk’s lawsuit against the company and its CEO, Sam Altman. Musk opposes a move to for-profit status on similar grounds.
Indeed, animus is growing against OpenAI and its efforts to transition from nonprofit control to for-profit status. A key chunk of the company’s latest round of $40 billion in funding led by SoftBank is predicated on such a move by the end of the year, which would ease the path to a mega-IPO as early as 2026, industry experts say.
In response to the letter, OpenAI issued the following statement: “Our Board has been very clear: our nonprofit will be strengthened and any changes to our existing structure would be in service of ensuring the broader public can benefit from AI. Our for-profit will be a public benefit corporation, similar to several other AI labs like Anthropic — where some of these former employees now work — and xAI, except that they do not support a nonprofit. 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.”
