Three Nobel Prize winners together with ten former OpenAI employees have requested California Attorney General Rob Bonta and Delaware Attorney General Kathy Jennings to block OpenAI’s transition from nonprofit to for-profit status. The coalition which includes ex-policy adviser Page Hedley sent a letter this week to express their worries about ChatGPT technology achieving superhuman capabilities without its original public mission to prioritize safety.
The Associated Press heard from Hedley that he worries about who will control the technology after its creation. OpenAI operates as a Delaware corporation with San Francisco headquarters while planning to establish itself as a public benefit corporation in the same way as Anthropic and Elon Musk’s xAI while maintaining a nonprofit division. The company asserts that this structure will maximize public benefits from AI developments. The coalition believes that moving control to a for-profit model will make commercial interests more important than protecting against possible dangers such as AI-generated misinformation and economic disruption.
The letter asks Democratic AGs to maintain OpenAI’s charitable purpose because the company was established to develop AI responsibly. The debate shows the existing conflict between AI industry commercialization speed and ethical requirements. The restructuring of OpenAI will establish important guidelines for other AI companies regarding their governance of powerful technologies. The investigation results will determine how public trust will evolve while maintaining the equilibrium between AI innovation and accountability during its development.
