This is the most important question, IMO! ChatGPT says that employees and donors would have to show that they were defrauded (lied to), which IMO wouldn’t exactly be hard given the founding documents. But the real power falls to the government, both state (Delaware presumably…?) and federal. It mentions the IRS, but AFAIU the DoJ itself could easily bring litigation based on defrauding the government. Hell, maybe throw the SEC in there!
In a normal situation, the primary people with standing to prevent such a move would be the board members of the non-profit, which makes sense. Luckily for Sam, the employees helped kick out all the dissenters a long time ago.
Genuinely curious because I have no idea how any of this works...
Would the founding documents actually count as proof of a lie? I feel like the defense could easily make the argument that the documents accurately represented their intent at the time, but as time went on they found that it made more sense to change.
It seems like, if the founding documents were to be proof of a lie, you'd have to have corresponding proof that the documents were intentionally written to mislead people.
Great point, and based on my amateur understanding you’re absolutely correct. I was mostly speaking so confidently because these founding documents in particular define the company as being founded to prevent exactly this.
You’re right that Altman is/will sell it as an unexpected but necessary adaptation to external circumstances, but that’s a hard sell. Potentially not to a court, sadly, but definitely in the public eye. For example:
We are concerned about late-stage AGI development becoming a competitive race without time for adequate safety precautions… We are committed to providing public goods that help society navigate the path to AGI.
And this is the very first paragraph of their founding blog post, from 2015:
OpenAI is a non-profit artificial intelligence research company. Our goal is to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return. Since our research is free from financial obligations, we can better focus on a positive human impact.
In the US standing is a specific legal concept about whether you have a valid reason/role to bring up a particular issue. For example most of Donald Trump’s lawsuits around the 2020 election were rejected for a lack of standing rather than on merit (whether the case is any good).
Early hires, who were lured there by the mission?
Donors?
People who were supposed to be served by the non-profit (everyone)?
Some government regulator?