AI giant demands all communications and donor information from advocacy groups opposing its £120 billion for-profit conversion, sparking backlash from own employees
At least seven nonprofit organisations critical of OpenAI’s transformation into a for-profit company have received what they describe as aggressive and overly broad subpoenas designed to intimidate them into silence, prompting an extraordinary public revolt from within the artificial intelligence behemoth itself.
The subpoenas, issued as part of OpenAI’s ongoing legal battle with co-founder Elon Musk, demand extensive documentation including all donor information, private communications about the company’s governance, and details about any connections to Musk or Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg – despite most organisations having no relationship with either billionaire.
The controversy erupted online on Friday when employees of targeted nonprofits shared details of the subpoenas on social media, leading to the unusual spectacle of current OpenAI staff publicly criticising their employer’s tactics.
“This doesn’t seem great,” Joshua Achiam, OpenAI’s head of mission alignment, wrote on X in response to the allegations. “We have a duty to and a mission for all of humanity. There are things that can go wrong with power and sometimes people on the inside have to be willing to point it out loudly.”
Sheriff’s Deputies at the Door
Nathan Calvin, the 29-year-old general counsel for Encode, a three-person AI policy nonprofit, described the shocking moment a sheriff’s deputy arrived at his home to serve the legal demand whilst he was having dinner with his wife in August.
Calvin wrote that Encode had criticised OpenAI’s restructuring and worked on AI regulations, including California’s SB 53 transparency law. I believe OpenAI used the pretext of their lawsuit against Elon Musk to intimidate their critics and imply that Elon is behind all of them,” he said.
The subpoenas demand extraordinarily broad categories of documents. Tyler Johnston, founder of AI watchdog group The Midas Project, said he received “a knock at my door in Oklahoma with a demand for every text/email/document that, in the ‘broadest sense permitted,’ relates to OpenAI’s governance and investors”.
Johnston wrote that OpenAI demanded “practically speaking, a list of every journalist, congressional office, partner organisation, former employee, and member of the public we’d spoken to about their restructuring”. His organisation has never received funding from Musk and has actually criticised Musk’s AI company xAI as being run “so horridly it makes OpenAI ‘saintly in comparison.'”
Pattern of Targeting Critics
The seven nonprofits receiving subpoenas include the San Francisco Foundation, Ekō, the Future of Life Institute, Encode, Legal Advocates for Safe Science and Technology (LASST), The Midas Project, and the Coalition for AI Nonprofit Integrity (CANI).
The San Francisco Foundation, whose mission is to strengthen communities and foster philanthropy in the San Francisco area, says it has never received any funding from Musk nor participated in his lawsuit. The foundation helped lead a petition in January asking California’s attorney general to prevent OpenAI’s attempt to restructure from a nonprofit to a for-profit entity.
Judith Bell, the foundation’s chief impact officer, said: “OpenAI, an organisation whose assets have been estimated in the hundreds of billions of dollars, is effectively one of the largest nonprofit entities in history. Its assets were accumulated for the explicit, charitable purpose of benefiting humanity”.
Emma Ruby-Sachs, executive director of Ekō, an international nonprofit “committed to curbing the growing power of corporations,” expressed bewilderment at receiving a subpoena after her organisation had explicitly told OpenAI it had no ties to Musk.
We had written to them and said we’re over 70% funded by small online donations from individuals, and we’ve run multiple campaigns against Elon Musk in the last year,” Ruby-Sachs told NBC News. She noted that Ekō even ran a billboard advertisement in Times Square depicting Musk as a king and advocating for him to be fired during his stint at the Department of Government Efficiency.
Legal Experts Question Tactics
Sean Eskovitz, a litigator and former assistant United States attorney uninvolved in the case, told NBC News that “the breadth of these subpoenas strike me as quite aggressive and quite broad.
He added: “There would have to be a very close look at the scope of the subpoena in order to ensure that nonparties are not being harassed, that their speech is not being chilled, and that the proponent of the subpoena is not using the subpoena for some ulterior purpose”.
Robert Weissman, co-president of Public Citizen, a consumer advocacy organisation that has criticised OpenAI but has not received a subpoena, was blunt in his assessment. “This behaviour is highly unusual. It’s 100% intended to intimidate,” he said. “This is the kind of tactic you would expect from the most cutthroat for-profit corporation. It’s an attempt to bully nonprofit critics, to chill speech and deter them from speaking out.”
Tyler Whitmer, president of Legal Advocates for Safe Science and Technology, described the situation starkly: “I think Musk is a malign influence in the world right now. Part of my mission is to hold Musk’s xAI to account in the same way I hold OpenAI to account. It’s just that OpenAI is supposed to be better than this.”
Real-World Consequences
The intimidation tactics appear to be having their intended effect on some organisations. Tyler Johnston wrote on Monday that the subpoena and ensuing news coverage caused insurance brokers to refuse to cover his small watchdog organisation. “If you wanted to constrain an org’s speech, intimidation would be one strategy, but making them uninsurable is another, and maybe that’s what’s happened to us with this subpoena,” he wrote.
The Future of Life Institute, which received at least $10 million from Musk ending in 2021 for AI research grants, also received a subpoena in October despite having no input from Musk in its activities. “We assume the subpoena has to do with us generally calling for more oversight and transparency on the development of advanced AI and AI companies in general, which currently have zero regulation or meaningful oversight,” an FLI spokesperson said.
Internal Dissent at OpenAI
The public criticism from OpenAI’s own employees represents a remarkable break in the company’s typically tight-lipped culture. Former OpenAI research scientist Steven Adler told NBC News: “I’m surprised that OpenAI’s Board would consider these actions consistent with its nonprofit legal obligations, or that they’d feel personally comfortable with this conduct.
Helen Toner, a former OpenAI board member who was involved in the 2023 drama surrounding CEO Sam Altman’s brief ousting, wrote that whilst OpenAI does good research, “the dishonesty & intimidation tactics in their policy work are really not”. Musk reshared her comment to his 200 million followers, adding “OpenAI was built on a lie.”
Daniel Kokotajlo, a former OpenAI employee and whistleblower who previously exposed the company’s secret non-disparagement clauses, provided context about the psychological pressure involved. “I was super scared last year when I spoke up about OpenAI’s secret nondisparagement clause, even though objectively speaking I was in the right. When it’s actually happening to you in real life, the psychological pressure to just stay quiet is pretty darn strong and most people cave to it. That’s why intimidation tactics work.”
OpenAI’s Defence
OpenAI’s Chief Strategy Officer Jason Kwon defended the subpoenas on X, writing that after Musk sued OpenAI, several organisations “joined in and ran campaigns backing his opposition to OpenAI’s restructure. This raised transparency questions about who was funding them and whether there was any coordination.”
Kwon stated: “When a third party inserts themselves into active litigation, they are subject to standard legal processes. We issued a subpoena to ensure transparency around their involvement and funding. This is a routine step in litigation, not a separate legal action”.
However, critics note that six of the seven nonprofits were not involved in the lawsuit before OpenAI brought them into it through the subpoenas, and most have no connection to Musk whatsoever.
Stakes of the Battle
The controversy comes as OpenAI seeks to complete its transformation from a nonprofit to a for-profit public benefit corporation, a change the company says is necessary to raise the capital required for its mission. The restructuring would allow investors to hold valuable equity rather than just receiving a slice of profits.
Critics argue the change could allow OpenAI, now valued at over $150 billion (£120 billion), to pursue profit over its charitable mission to ensure artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. The San Francisco Foundation and over 50 other organisations have petitioned California’s attorney general to block the conversion unless OpenAI’s charitable assets – potentially worth hundreds of billions – are transferred to independent nonprofits.
The legal battle with Musk, who co-founded OpenAI in 2015 but left to start rival xAI, centres on whether OpenAI has betrayed its original nonprofit mission. Musk has accused the company of becoming “a textbook tale of altruism versus greed,” whilst OpenAI contends Musk is employing “bad-faith tactics to slow down OpenAI and seize control of the leading AI innovations for his personal benefit.”
Chilling Effect on Advocacy
Nathan Calvin described the experience as “the most stressful period of my professional life,” despite acknowledging that OpenAI conducts AI safety research “worthy of genuine praise.” Multiple organisations report spending significant resources responding to the subpoenas rather than focusing on their advocacy work.
Emma Ruby-Sachs of Ekō put the situation in stark terms: “OpenAI is another company, just like every other company, trying to use their money and power to pursue profits, even if it screws over the people of California and potentially all of humanity.”
The episode highlights growing tensions between Silicon Valley’s most powerful AI company and civil society groups pushing for oversight of artificial intelligence development. As AI technologies become increasingly central to society, the tactics used in this dispute may set precedents for how tech giants engage with their critics.
Follow for more updates on Britannia Daily
Image Credit:
Sam Altman — photo by TechCrunch / TechCrunch SF 2019, cropped, licensed under CC BY 4.0
