section_path: Strategy
section_name: Strategy
paragraph_text: Strategy
  
  In the early years before his 2018 departure, Musk posed the question: "What is the best thing we can do to ensure the future is good? We could sit on the sidelines or we can encourage regulatory oversight, or we could participate with the right structure with people who care deeply about developing AI in a way that is safe and is beneficial to humanity." He acknowledged that "there is always some risk that in actually trying to advance (friendly) AI we may create the thing we are concerned about"; but nonetheless, that the best defense was "to empower as many people as possible to have AI. If everyone has AI powers, then there's not any one person or a small set of individuals who can have AI superpower."
  
  Musk and Altman's counterintuitive strategy—that of trying to reduce the potential harm of AI by giving everyone access to it—is controversial among those concerned with existential risk from AI. Philosopher Nick Bostrom said, "If you have a button that could do bad things to the world, you don't want to give it to everyone." During a 2016 conversation about technological singularity, Altman said, "We don't plan to release all of our source code" and mentioned a plan to "allow wide swaths of the world to elect representatives to a new governance board". Greg Brockman stated, "Our goal right now... is to do the best thing there is to do. It's a little vague."
  
  Conversely, OpenAI's initial decision to withhold GPT-2 around 2019, due to a wish to "err on the side of caution" in the presence of potential misuse, was criticized by advocates of openness. Delip Rao, an expert in text generation, stated, "I don't think spent enough time proving was actually dangerous." Other critics argued that open publication was necessary to replicate the research and to create countermeasures.
  
  More recently, in 2022, OpenAI published its approach to the alignment problem, anticipating that aligning AGI to human values would likely be harder than aligning current AI systems: "Unaligned AGI could pose substantial risks to humanity and solving the AGI alignment problem could be so difficult that it will require all of humanity to work together". They stated that they intended to explore how to better use human feedback to train AI systems, and how to safely use AI to incrementally automate alignment research.
  
  In 2024, following the temporary removal of Sam Altman and his return, many employees gradually left OpenAI, including most of the original leadership team and a significant number of AI safety researchers. OpenAI also planned a restructuring to operate as a for-profit company. This restructuring could grant Altman a stake in the company.
  
  In March 2025, OpenAI made a policy proposal for the Trump administration to preempt pending AI-related state laws with federal laws. According to OpenAI, "This framework would extend the tradition of government receiving learnings and access, where appropriate, in exchange for providing the private sector relief fromthe 781 and counting proposed AI-related bills already introduced this year in US states."