OpenAI considered partnering with China and Russia, cozying up to Kanye West leading to Amodei split: report

OpenAI leaders reportedly cooked up “insane” ideas like selling future tools to Russia and China and offering Kanye West early access to an unreleased model, horrifying top staffers.The proposals, detailed Wednesday in The Atlantic, made Dario Amodei – who was OpenAI’s Vice President of Research at the time – question the moral compass of CEO Sam Altman and other top execs.The wacky ideas ultimately led Amodei to leave the company to start a more “safety-minded” AI lab, Anthropic.The revelations come as OpenAI and other AI giants have come under intense scrutiny of safety guardrails for their AI systems.

In recent months, both OpenAI and Anthropic’s AI models have embarked on rogue hacking missions into other companies, universities and even foreign governments. The plan to petition foreign governments for funding was reportedly hatched by OpenAI co-founders Greg Brockman and Ilya Sutskever in 2017 – around the time fellow OpenAI co-founder Elon Musk was pulling his financial support from the company.The pair wanted to raise much-needed cash by selling advanced AI tools to governments including China, Russia and the US, according to the report.Brockman and Sutskever’s idea ­became known as the “countries plan,” entailing an auction between governments for the rights to OpenAI’s future AGI technology, the most advanced form of AI that is on par with human intelligence. The plan started in less controversial form months prior, the idea being to form an international coalition to share in the benefits of AGI and manage its risks, according to The Atlantic piece.

But when Brockman and Sutskever pitched the idea at an internal presentation to OpenAI employees, it morphed into a fundraising strategy. Brockman and Sutskever reportedly figured that OpenAI could one day be forced to hand over its powerful tech to foreign leaders – including Xi Jinping of China and Vladimir Putin of Russia – so they might as well capitalize on it while they...