Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins/Futurism. Source: Getty Images
A man who works at an AI watchdog group became worried when OpenAI suddenly showed up at his door last year and demanded he return documents. Because of his blatant disbelief, he was being summoned.
“It’s a little scary to know that the most valuable private company in the world has your address and has shown up and has questions for you,” a man named Tyler Johnston, who founded the nonprofit advocacy group The Midas Project, said in a new interview with A more perfect union.
“They were asking about every former employee we talked to and what we told them,” he said. “Every congressional office we talked to, every potential investor we talked to.”
Johnson was not alone. in all, nbc news Reported last October As part of the lawsuit between OpenAI and Elon Musk, at least seven nonprofits that were critical of OpenAI were sent subpoenas at the time of reporting.
Later in the same October that Johnson was subpoenaed, OpenAI completed its restructuring into a for-profit public benefit corporation, a move that took more than a year and a half to make. It was challenged at every turn by Microsoft, which invested billions of dollars in the startup, and Musk, who co-founded OpenAI but left the company in 2018, reportedly over disagreements with Altman, and who is now suing him for abandoning his original philanthropic mission of creating open source models.
As the lawsuit progressed, a seemingly paranoid OpenAI began accusing its critics of being funded by Musk. And so the company representatives arrived at Johnston’s home.
“They wanted every single text message and document that we had that was in any way related to the restructuring of OpenAI,” he said. Perfect union.
The subpoena also comes as OpenAI and other tech companies worked to reject a California bill that would have required companies to restrict minors’ access to their AI models unless they could demonstrate that their guardrails prevent bots from promoting self-harm and other dangerous topics. With its restructuring on the line, and under the threat of being subject to powerful regulation, OpenAI had every reason to be more conscious than ever of its image. (Governor Gavin Newsom ultimately vetoed the bill, and a weaker version of the law was enacted instead.)
As other AI watchdogs came forward to share how OpenAI had subpoenaed them too, Johnston confronted his chief strategy officer Jason Kwon, who made a post on X accusing the Midas project of “suddenly” forming when Musk sued OpenAI, arguing that it raised “transparency questions.”
“What are you talking about?” wrote Desperate Johnson. “We were formed 19 months ago. We never talked to Musk and others or took funding from them, which we would have been happy to tell you if you asked even once.”
“In fact,” he added, “we’ve said that he runs xAI so badly that it makes OpenAI look ‘sacred in comparison.'”
Weeks later, Johnson revealed how news coverage of his organization being dragged into a lawsuit led to insurance brokers refusing to cover his nonprofit.
He said, “If you want to disrupt the speech of an organization, intimidation would be one strategy, but making them uninsured is another strategy, and that’s probably what happened to us with this subpoena.”
Now, he seems more worried than ever about how far companies like OpenAI will go to protect themselves. “The AI industry broadly is willing to work hard,” he said in the interview.
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