Sam Altman Is Giving OpenAI a Makeover to Woo Democrats

OpenAI has a New Deal to sell you. On Monday, the embattled tech company released an “industrial policy” blueprint that lays out a series of progressive-sounding policy proposals meant to ease a supposedly inevitable “transition” toward something called superintelligence. The document, which espouses the company’s commitment to some of Democrats’ favorite buzzwords—like “access, agency, and opportunity”—mostly reads like a convenient artifact for OpenAI to point to in the event that the party sweeps the midterms this fall. Conveniently, it was published the same day The New Yorker ran a feature online detailing CEO Sam Altman’s consistent willingness to stretch the truth in order to get ahead. (It’s not the first time he’s been described in this light; Karen Hao’s book Empire of AI paints a similar picture.)

The case for superintelligence that OpenAI lays out in its white paper is a curious one. It is a technology as important as electricity and the internal combustion engine that will solve all of humanity’s problems—so long as we prevent it from destroying civilization. Access to AI will be a necessity for economic participation. It may also crater the economy if policymakers don’t work together with industry to stop that from happening. The overriding message is that an all-powerful, shadowy, poorly defined superintelligence is imminent. Be excited, beware, and take OpenAI’s advice. 

The company’s policy proposals include several items you might expect to find in the platform of a softly left-wing congressional candidate, such as higher capital gains and corporate income taxes, expanded social safety nets, a public wealth fund, a four-day workweek, and transition programs for workers displaced by AI. But as OpenAI and other companies advancing large language models, or LLMS, continue to pour millions of dollars into politics, it’s hard to imagine that their armies of lobbyists will pound the pavement for social democratic programs. Some suggestions seem more self-serving. A section on “The Right to AI” calls, somewhat ominously, for treating it as “foundational for participation in the modern economy,” expanding “affordable, reliable access to foundational models” and making “a baseline level of capability broadly available, including through free or low-cost access points.” These sound like nice, charitable things to do. At the same time, suggesting that AI is an economic necessity is also a very good way for Altman’s company to grow its base of paid subscribers. 

OpenAI’s “New Deal” doesn’t seem designed to enact these wildly ambitious policy proposals so much as to dare Democrats to stand in the way of progress. With data centers facing backlash around the country, and calls for a federal moratorium, national regulations to restrict hyperscalers’ expansion plans could soon become a real possibility. OpenAI takes for granted that its dreams of superintelligence are already coming true whether you like it or not; policymakers can either follow its suggestions for taking advantage of that, and mitigate the downsides, or deal with the rather grave-sounding consequences.

While recent reporting depicts Altman as personally unpleasant, he’s hardly the only AI developer to wax apocalyptic. His more integrity-pilled opponents, including Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and ex-OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, seem to share similarly whimsical ideas about the hell their thinking machines are capable of bringing about. At one point, Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz, the writers of the New Yorker article about Altman, report that Sutskever wrote an email to fellow higher-ups at OpenAI saying that the nonprofit was losing sight of its mission to prevent a “dictatorship” of Artificial General Intelligence—a mysterious “threshold at which machines match human cognitive capacities,” in Farrow and Marantz’s words. Altman has in recent years referred to AGI as “magic intelligence in the sky.” Once they create such magic, Sutskever feared, it might create a dictatorship.  

You don’t have to be especially skeptical about AI’s capabilities to find this kind of talk pretty silly. It’s not uncommon to hear Altman and his competitors talk openly about their fears that their products pose an “existential risk” to humanity; i.e., that “misaligned” AI will kill off human civilization as soon as the next few years. It should also be cause for concern that people who genuinely believe these millenarian fantasies—or at least think they make for clever marketing—now exercise almost exclusive control over what seem to be very powerful technologies. Anthropic announced today that it wasn’t widely releasing its new model, Mythos, because it is too good at finding “high-severity vulnerabilities” and exhibited a “potentially dangerous capability” for circumventing the company’s safeguards. As part of that announcement, Anthropic said it would share Mythos with only a handful of “select organizations,” Business Insider reports, including Google, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, Nvidia, and JPMorgan Chase. Whatever Mythos is actually capable of, it should be deeply troubling that a single firm can single-handedly decide to hand something it warns is the world’s most powerful hacker over to some of the world’s biggest companies. 

Whether or not AI executives actually believe they are building a new god, threats of superintelligence and roving hackbots function as bizarro marketing for companies facing increasingly broad pushback. This week, The Financial Times’ Rana Foroohar raised the question of whether AI is “the new fracking.” The column focused largely on mounting grassroots opposition to data center build-outs, but it’s a useful analogy for lots of other reasons. In the case of fracking, a heady mix of long-term government backing; high oil prices; low interest rates; patient, deep-pocketed investors; federal bailouts; and skilled salesmen helped turn what had been an established but prohibitively expensive drilling method into one of this century’s most transformative developments to date. Fracking fueled America’s recovery from the Great Recession, kneecapped its coal industry, and achieved domestic policymakers’ long-held goal of becoming a net exporter of oil and gas. 

LLMs are another massively capital-intensive business that has struggled with profitability and could be just as groundbreaking, with similarly abundant downsides. But as OpenAI’s “New Deal” proposal seems to acknowledge, it won’t be able to break things alone; it needs help from the federal government. The policy blueprint accordingly calls for “new public-private partnership models to finance and accelerate the expansion of energy infrastructure required to power AI,” expanding on OpenAI’s $500 billion Stargate project, to build out AI infrastructure. 

Portions of the policy brief’s case for this kind of collaboration between government and industry, including subsidies, read like missives from the past—specifically, the Biden administration. “In normal times, the case for letting markets work on their own is strong,” the brief states. “Capitalism, imperfect as it is, remains an effective system for translating human ingenuity into shared prosperity. But industrial policy can play an important role when market forces alone aren’t sufficient—when new technologies create opportunities and risks that existing institutions aren’t equipped to manage.” 

Fittingly, the target audience for OpenAI’s “New Deal” seems to be Democrats—and potentially even former Biden staffers and Cabinet members—who also like to talk this way. If they’re gullible enough to fall for OpenAI’s progressive slop, they might as well start paying Sam Altman to build bridges too.

It isn’t anything new for corporations to claim their businesses are important for national security, or to call for a stable regulatory environment of their own choosing. Most, though, don’t claim humanity will collapse if they don’t get it.