{"id":10165,"date":"2026-04-12T13:45:00","date_gmt":"2026-04-12T13:45:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/openai-staffers-horrified-insane-plan\/"},"modified":"2026-04-12T13:45:00","modified_gmt":"2026-04-12T13:45:00","slug":"openai-staffers-horrified-insane-plan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/openai-staffers-horrified-insane-plan\/","title":{"rendered":"OpenAI Staffers Horrified When Senior Leadership Hatched \u201cInsane\u201d Plan to Pit World Governments Against Each Other"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

OpenAI leaders horrified staffers after proposing an \u201cinsane\u201d plan to enrich the company by pitting world governments against each other.<\/p>\n

This anecdote of near comic-book-villainry comes from The New Yorker\u2019s <\/em>sweeping new investigation<\/a> into CEO Sam Altman, which documents his alarming pattern of lying and manipulating to build his AI empire, a behavior that some insiders likened to that of an actual \u201csociopath<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Altman\u2019s second-in-command Greg Brockman features heavily. In 2017, according to the reporting, he hatched a geopolitical scheme which internally came to be known as the \u201ccountries plan.\u201d Unimpressed by his ethics adviser\u2019s suggestion to avoid a nuclear-like arms race by forming an international body to cooperate on AI safety, Brockman openly mused about playing world powers like China and Russia against each other, such as by starting a bidding war for its tech. According to the ethics adviser, Page Hedley, Brockman\u2019s logic seemed to be, \u201cIt worked for nuclear weapons, why not AI?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe premise, which they didn\u2019t dispute, was \u2018We\u2019re talking about potentially the most destructive technology ever invented \u2014 what if we sold it to Putin?’\u201d an exasperated Hedley told The New Yorker<\/em>.<\/p>\n

OpenAI\u2019s then-policy director Jack Clark described it as a \u201cprisoner\u2019s dilemma, where all of the nations need to give us funding,\u201d and that \u201cimplicitly makes not giving us funding kind of dangerous.\u201d<\/p>\n

A junior researcher recalled thinking at the meeting where the plan was discussed that it was \u201ccompletely f*cking insane.\u201d<\/p>\n

The plan was eventually dropped months later, after some employees threatened to quit.<\/p>\n

Of employee dissent, Hedley opined that it \u201cwas always something that had more weight in Sam\u2019s calculations than \u2018This is not a good plan because it might cause a war between great powers.’\u201d<\/p>\n

Altman also tried his hand at manipulating governments \u2014 namely, the US.<\/p>\n

Beginning in 2017, he would repeatedly tell US intelligence officials that China had supposedly launched an \u201cAGI Manhattan Project,\u201d referring to artificial general intelligence. For OpenAI and thereby the US to stay on equal footing, his company would need billions of dollars in government money. When officials pressed for a source, Altman replied ambiguously that \u201cI\u2019ve heard things.\u201d<\/p>\n

One official who looked into the claims concluded that Altman had made it all up: \u201cIt was just being used as a sales pitch.\u201d<\/p>\n

Altman, the reporting described, casted himself as an Oppenheimer-like figure. While the driving physicist behind the invention of the atomic bomb used \u201cimpassioned appeals about saving the world from the Nazis to persuade physicists to uproot their lives,\u201d it wrote, \u201cAltman leverages fears about the geopolitical stakes of his technology.\u201d<\/p>\n

More on AI:<\/strong> Sam Altman\u2019s Coworkers Say He Can Barely Code and Misunderstands Basic Machine Learning Concepts<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The post OpenAI Staffers Horrified When Senior Leadership Hatched \u201cInsane\u201d Plan to Pit World Governments Against Each Other<\/a> appeared first on Futurism<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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OpenAI leaders horrified staffers after proposing an \u201cinsane\u201d plan to enrich the company by pitting world governments against each other. This anecdote of near comic-book-villainry comes from The New Yorker\u2019s…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[177,179],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10165","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-artificial-intelligence","category-openai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10165","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10165"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10165\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10165"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10165"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10165"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}