Encode, the nonprofit organization that co-sponsored California’s ill-fated SB 1047 AI safety legislation, has requested permission to file an amicus brief in support of Elon Musk’s injunction to halt OpenAI’s transition to a for-profit company.
In a proposed brief submitted to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California Friday afternoon, counsel for Encode said that OpenAI’s conversion to a for-profit would “undermine” the firm’s mission to “develop and deploy … transformative technology in a way that is safe and beneficial to the public.”
“OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman, claim to be developing society-transforming technology, and those claims should be taken seriously,” the brief read. “If the world truly is at the cusp of a new age of artificial general intelligence (AGI), then the public has a profound interest in having that technology controlled by a public charity legally bound to prioritize safety and the public benefit rather than an organization focused on generating financial returns for a few privileged investors.”
In a statement, Sneha Revanur, Encode’s founder and president, accused OpenAI of “internalizing the profits [of AI] but externalizing the consequences to all of humanity,” and said that “[t]he courts must intervene to ensure AI development serves the public interest.”
Encode’s brief has garnered the support of Geoffrey Hinton, a pioneer in the AI field and 2024 Nobel Laureate, and UC Berkeley computer science professor and director at the Center for Human-Compatible AI Stuart Russell.
“OpenAI was founded as an explicitly safety-focused nonprofit and made a variety of safety-related promises in its charter,” Hinton said in a press release. “It received numerous tax and other benefits from its nonprofit status. Allowing it to tear all of that up when it becomes inconvenient sends a very bad message to other actors in the ecosystem.”
OpenAI was launched in 2015 as a nonprofit research lab. But as its experiments became increasingly capital-intensive, it created its current structure, taking on outside investments from VCs and companies, including Microsoft.