Episode Details
Back to Episodes[Linkpost] “Questions raised about OpenAI leaders’ trustworthiness by the New Yorker” by Remmelt
Description
One excerpt stuck out for me – on Brockman's idea to play China, Russia, and other world powers against each other:
In 2017, Amodei hired Page Hedley, a former public-interest lawyer, to be OpenAI's policy and ethics adviser. In an early PowerPoint presentation to executives, Hedley outlined how OpenAI might avert a “catastrophic” arms race—perhaps by building a coalition of A.I. labs that would eventually coördinate with an international body akin to NATO, to insure that the technology was deployed safely. As Hedley recalled it, Brockman didn’t understand how this would help the company beat its competitors. “No matter what I said,” Hedley told us, “Greg kept going back to ‘So how do we raise more money? How do we win?’
According to several interviews and contemporaneous records, Brockman offered a counterproposal: OpenAI could enrich itself by playing world powers—including China and Russia—against one another, perhaps by starting a bidding war among them. According to Hedley, the thinking seemed to be, It worked for nuclear weapons, why not for A.I.? He was aghast: “The premise, which they didn’t dispute, was ‘We’re talking about potentially the most destructive technology ever invented—what if we sold it to [...]
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First published:
April 6th, 2026
Linkpost URL:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/04/13/sam-altman-may-control-our-future-can-he-be-trusted
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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.