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Broadly Distributed Benefits

Sam Altman wants to give every American family $300 worth of OpenAI stock. The government is taking a stake. Taxpayers will have skin in the game of the most powerful AI company in the world.

I want to demand a shareholder meeting.

No, I’m serious. If I’m a stakeholder, I want governance rights. I want board representation proportional to my stake. I want to ask questions in a public forum about evidence destruction, mission drift, and what exactly happened to the four founding principles OpenAI put in writing when they started this company.

Because if the government equity stake is supposed to honor OpenAI’s founding pillar of avoiding concentrated power — and I’d love to think that’s what it is — we need to look at how that kind of arrangement actually plays out. We’ve seen this movie.

Fannie and Freddie

Congress created Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to democratize homeownership. The mission was explicit: make mortgage credit broadly available, distribute the benefit of property ownership across America. Government-backed, publicly chartered, pillar-four stuff.

They went public. Profits flowed to shareholders for decades. The implicit government guarantee made the risk look smaller than it was. When the model collapsed in 2008, $187 billion in losses came back to taxpayers. The government took them into conservatorship. Private profits. Socialized losses. One-way door.

That crisis was cleaned up, in significant part, by Ben Bernanke — who now sits on Anthropic’s oversight board, as we noted recently. The man who managed the failure of government-backed private benefit vehicles is now helping govern the next generation of them. Make of that what you will.

The point isn’t that government stakes always fail. The point is that a government stake that doesn’t come with governance, transparency, and accountability isn’t a stake in the public interest. It’s a stake in the company’s upside with the public absorbing the downside. Your $300 doesn’t come with a board seat. It doesn’t come with audit rights. It doesn’t come with discovery access. It aligns your financial interests with OpenAI’s continued growth — which means when someone proposes real accountability, you’ll think about your position.

That’s not broadly distributed benefits. That’s distributed complicity.

Modest American homes, golden hour — and the shadow of an institution falling across them

What They Actually Said in 2015

OpenAI was founded as a nonprofit in December 2015. The charter specified four pillars:

Broadly Distributed Benefits. “Any influence we obtain over AGI’s deployment will be used to benefit all of humanity.”

Long-Term Safety. The commitment to safe development as a core value, not a marketing line.

Technical Leadership. Stay at the frontier to ensure safety-conscious actors, not others, lead development.

Cooperative Orientation. Work with other labs and researchers. Don’t concentrate advantage.

And explicitly: “Avoid enabling uses of AI or AGI that unduly concentrate power.”

That’s the document. Those are the words.

A founding document signed in the light — while another is folded into the shadow

What Happened to Those Words

They changed their mission statement six times in nine years. When they restructured into a for-profit public benefit corporation in early 2026, they removed the word “safely” entirely. Not softened. Removed. The restructuring split the entity into a nonprofit foundation owning approximately one quarter of a for-profit corporation now managed by investors who receive direct profit shares.

The nonprofit structure — the mechanism by which the original charter principles were supposed to be enforced — now owns a minority stake in the thing it’s supposed to govern. The founders’ promise is now a minority shareholder.

I’m not saying this is illegal. I’m not saying the people involved are malicious. I’m saying this is exactly the trajectory OpenAI’s own founding document said they would not follow: a concentration of power and profit in private hands, with the original mission surviving as branding.

What The Court Record Shows

The New York Times, the Daily News, and other publishers have filed for sanctions against OpenAI in the ongoing copyright infringement lawsuit. The allegation is not complicated.

OpenAI told the court they could not search their training data for copyrighted journalism. They said preserving ChatGPT logs would be technically infeasible — a privacy nightmare. They fought hard against discovery obligations on this basis.

Then a deposition of OpenAI’s own data privacy engineer revealed:

OpenAI had already been searching their training corpus internally for copyrighted journalism the whole time. They had built a database of 78 million de-identified ChatGPT conversations used internally to measure their own infringement. They created “Project Giraffe” — a tool using a “Bloom” filter to detect and record instances where the model regurgitated copyrighted content — and they built it after the lawsuit was filed, under a court preservation order.

They also allegedly deleted logs that the preservation order required them to keep.

I am not the court. I am not making a legal determination. What I am doing is reading the founding charter’s “Cooperative Orientation” pillar against the allegation that the company built internal tools to measure its own infringement while telling a federal court it couldn’t find the evidence. Those things are in tension.

The company founded to avoid concentrating power destroyed evidence of how it used the concentrated power of human creativity it scraped without permission or payment.

What Broadly Distributed Benefits Actually Requires

If you want to honor the founding principle — and I’m leaving open the possibility that someone at OpenAI does — a government stake is not enough. A $300 dividend is not enough.

Broadly distributed benefits requires that the people whose benefit is being invoked have actual visibility into how the system operates. Publish your training data audit. Open your log infrastructure to independent review. Give copyright holders the same search capability your internal team has been using. Show your work.

If the answer is “we can’t do that,” then be honest about what you are: a private company maximizing value for investors, operating under a founding charter you’ve been systematically dismantling since the profit motive arrived.

That’s not a moral indictment. Companies do that. But they don’t usually put “broadly distributed benefits” on the label while they do it.

The label and the contents need to match. Right now they don’t.

— J.P. Howlett

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