SAN FRANCISCO — Opponents of OpenAI’s multi billion-dollar corporate overhaul want to take the fight directly to California voters, announcing two separate ballot initiatives and a campaign website that urges billionaires like Elon Musk to help stop the business expansion.
“Billionaires may be unpopular now, but they are the only ones capable of stopping this conversion. And the only thing that will stop this conversion is funding the ballot initiative,” says the website for the so-called OpenTheft campaign.
The ballot push seeks to overturn the ChatGPT maker’s hard-fought reorganization, which OpenAI completed in October amid intense pressure from detractors who contended that the changes would betray its original, nonprofit mission. Nonprofit groups and others had lobbied the attorneys general of California and Delaware, both of which have oversight of the company, to reject the restructuring; instead, they recently authorized it.
Each measure will have to receive a title and summary from the California attorney general’s office in the next few weeks before it can start gathering the signatures needed to qualify for the ballot.
One of the projects is led by Poornima Ramarao, the mother of one former OpenAI employee turned whistleblower, whose death was ruled a suicide by authorities. Ramarao says she thinks there was foul play in his death and has asked Musk for help. The tech mogul — a former OpenAI co-founder who has his own lawsuit against the restructuring process pending — has expressed his support for her side of the case in the past.
Ramarao told National Diplomat she’s coordinating with a coalition that attempted (unsuccessfully) to pass a state bill earlier this year to stop OpenAI from restructuring as a corporate entity.
Her proposal would establish an oversight board with the power to approve for-profit conversions by charitable research enterprises and to reverse them, effective at the start of 2018.
Though she did not mention OpenAI in her request, Ramarao told National Diplomat it was “100 percent” an answer to the company, adding: “I’m inspired by my son who tragically sacrificed his life for [this] cause.”
The state’s ballot initiative coordinator also received paperwork for a separate effort to substitute nonprofit companies’ conversions and public benefit corporations, filed by Alexander Oldham on Monday.
It would mandate that certain AI companies file public benefit plans and create an independent body within the state Department of Justice to hold them to their word. The entity would be able to impose conditions on or reject those companies’ expansion plans.
Oldham did not immediately respond to questions on Tuesday.
OpenAI was created as a nonprofit, and its reconfiguration as a public benefit corporation will facilitate fundraising and potentially a public offering. The nonprofit will continue to hold a controlling stake in the for-profit, and the company says these changes better position it to compete with global competitors and fulfill its stated mission of ensuring that artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity.
Ramarao confirmed to The Daily Beast on Tuesday that her effort is associated with the nonprofit Coalition for AI Nonprofit Integrity and its just-launched website, asking tech billionaire chieftains, including Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Dustin Moskovitz, and crypto billionaire Vitalik Buterin, to bankroll its ballot fight.
“After ten years of watching the foundational technology living up to its potential, this is going to be incredibly valuable, and we want to make sure well-funded actors have the same goal as us: ensuring artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity,” says Rubin on the site.
“Rather than allowing a single decision by the attorney general to deny California voters’ judgment, our measure puts this important policy question directly before voters,” he added.
The coalition is trying to raise $100 million for the campaign, and Ramarao said that donations would be disclosed on the site.
These are the people who are chosen; they’ve given to causes for humanity in the past. “They have monies,” Ramarao said, explaining why the ask was directed at billionaires. “And this is the biggest cause they can get behind.”
Musk, Moskovitz, and Buterin have all contributed to AI safety research through organizations such as the Future of Life Institute and Coefficient Giving (formerly known as Open Philanthropy).
“This is an unfounded effort by CANI to retry a decision that has already been reached,” said Jamie Radice, a spokesperson for OpenAI, in relation to the initiative filed by Ramarao. She did not address the petition filed by Oldham. CANI could not be reached immediately for comment.
As OpenAI prepared its reorganization, dozens of organizations raised concerns that the nonprofit would have less influence over the transformed for-profit, and that the company could use the dollars it earned for charity to step in on behalf of investors.
In its pitch to potential donors, the OpenTheft site had previously mentioned that it had brought on experts from the law firm Nielsen Merksamer, known for its work on ballot initiatives like Proposition 22, which Uber and Lyft supported. The battle over that 2020 ballot measure was the most costly in state history, and it resulted in a victory for ride-hailing companies seeking to classify their drivers as independent contractors rather than employees.
“Our legal team wrote and passed this monumental initiative despite intense opposition,” the OpenTheft website maintained. The references were removed after National Diplomat contacted them.
The initiative is not one promoted by Nielsen Merksamer, and the firm asked it to remove all references to the initiative from its site, partner John Moffatt said. CANI had contracted the firm to lobby on the bill it sought to ram through this year in response to OpenAI’s conversion, AB 501, which was eventually gutted and amended.
The measure resembles AB 501, a bill this year aimed at blocking mega-sized, venture-capital-backed nonprofits from turning for-profit.
OpenAI has issued subpoenas in the Musk lawsuit to uncover CANI’s founders and, earlier this year, unsuccessfully asked state officials in California to investigate the nonprofit. OpenAI has repeatedly charged CANI with being linked to Musk — charges that the group has denied, without revealing who is actually backing its work. Ramarao is one of the donors to CANI. Source
