OpenAI Moves to Complete Potentially the Largest Theft in Human History
82 comments
·November 1, 2025overvale
I'm so genuinely confused by all this. It seems that Altman has a lot of detractors here, and I'm not sure why (my fault for not keeping up I guess). But a company that wants to spend trillions of dollars on AGI infrastructure and hopes to re-shape the entire global economy surely needs to plow a staggering amount of money into its operations and not into a non-profit. I get that there is controversy over redirecting profits of a very successful business from a non-profit entity (which would be great) to private parties, but... that was always going to happen right? Am I just too cynical?
What am I missing? I'm genuinely curious.
Also, the largest theft in human history surely has to be the East India Company extracting something like 50 trillion from India over 200 years, right?
kamikazeturtles
> Also, the largest theft in human history surely has to be the East India Company extracting something like 50 trillion from India over 200 years, right?
I never understood these sorts of statements. I feel historical events maybe after the Victorian age can claim to be theft, otherwise it's just empires and conquest.
Adjusted for inflation, wouldn't Alexander the Great's plundering of Persia, which at the time comprised 40% of the world's population, be the greatest theft in human history, using your logic?
tbrownaw
> I feel historical events maybe after the Victorian age can claim to be theft, otherwise it's just empires and conquest.
One criterion that might work is whether there's some greater power around that says it's theft, and is able/willing to enforce that in some manner.
So for example a successful conquest isn't theft, but a failed conquest is probably attempted theft (and vandalism of course).
zozbot234
The world population was a lot lower back then, and India is quite large to begin with.
overvale
Yeah, you're right, it's not a fair comparison.
IncreasePosts
If we're going by theft as a percent of world GDP, then surely the biggest theft was when Zog stole Ug's best smashing rock
Terr_
That's nothin', my great^N ancestor was part of a horde that conquered the entire planet in a Grey-Goo apocalypse.
Sure, it's divided up amongst all the descendants now, but it was quite a heist.
whimsicalism
when Zog stole Ug’s intellectual property rights in the starting of fire.
paulcole
This was my favorite Far Side
ninetyninenine
The measurement should be theft per capita or how many people did Sam Altman take from?
Divide total GDP by the population and turn it into one unit.
Ug's best smashing rock would be 1.
vessenes
The article tracks some good historical quotes. But it doesn’t seem to try and steel man the other side, that is, what’s oAI worth without its workers and an attached for profit company?
To the extent the answer is ‘much lower’ then he could have spent a whole blog post congratulating California ag and Sam for landing the single largest new public charity in real dollar terms maybe ever.
If the point is “it sticks in my craw that the team won’t keep working how they used to plan on working even when the team has already left” then, fair enough. But I disagree with theft as an angle; there are too many counter factuals to think through before you should make a strong case it’s theft.
Put another way - I think the writer hates Sam and so we get this. I’m guessing we will not be reading an article where Ilya leaving and starting a C corp with no charitable component is called theft.
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BrenBarn
Are you saying that because you're cynical you thought Altman would always go for the biggest money grab possible, and so you won't criticize him on that basis? I'm cynical enough to think a lot of people will always go for the biggest money grab possible, but I still will criticize them for doing so.
overvale
No, I'm saying I'm cynical because I assume that whenever this much money is involved there's no way events unfold in a fair, ethical, utopian way. It always turns into a knife fight in the mud.
BrenBarn
Okay, but what I'm asking about is this part of your previous comment:
> It seems that Altman has a lot of detractors here, and I'm not sure why
Why are you confused/surprised that Altman has detractors?
jgalt212
But they should unfold in a legal way. And I'm not convinced that they have.
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skinnymuch
Yes. Colonialism is certainly going to be worse. One AI company going from non profit to whatever it is now is not close.
mentalgear
> It’s as if a mugger demanded all your money, you talked them down to giving up half your money, and you called that exchange a ‘change that recapitalized you.’
halJordan
Strictly speaking, in this scenario the mugger was recapitalized
deepdarkforest
Breaking news: For profit company chases profit, briefly pretends it's not while it is
khazhoux
This is it exactly.
Plus, why do people think OAI is still special? Facebook, Google, and many smaller companies are doing the exact same work developing models.
periodjet
Theft of what, and from whom? The author breathlessly jumps around without ever establishing the most basic premise. Seems like clickbait doom-mongering more than anything substantial.
CPLX
Here’s an analogy that might help:
Imagine if an executive was running the world’s largest charity for cancer research, which was chartered to make sure a cure remained in the public trust and raised millions with that promise.
But then once they discovered a cure for cancer the executive instead decided to transfer that cure to a ruthlessly competitive company they personally owned a large percentage of and then become a billionaire many times over.
JohnnyMarcone
I thought Altman didn't own hardly any equity.
whatpeoplewant
The IP concern is real, but it isn’t binary: we can move from monolithic pretraining on scraped corpora to multi-agent, agentic LLM workflows that retrieve licensed content at inference with provenance, metering, and revocation. Distributed agentic AI lets rights holders expose APIs or sandboxes so models reason in parallel over data without copying it, yielding auditable logs and pay-per-use economics. Parallel agentic AI pipelines can also enforce policy (e.g., no-train/no-store) as first-class constraints, which is much harder to do with a single opaque model.
labrador
It seems weird to say speculative gains were lost
zozbot234
Especially when those same speculative gains were predicated on the "theft" happening in the first place. The non-profit got at least a full order of magnitude more value out of the current deal than they could have gotten had OpenAI left their corporate structure unchanged. And they still get to control more of OpenAI if its valuation explodes, so the "upside" profile that they used to get by capping profits is broadly unchanged. Want even more upside? Then the non-profit can just plow some of their current stake into buying cheap options at their fair market price.
FeepingCreature
Sure, but in this case the speculative scenario is the entire premise behind the existence of the charity in the first place.
labrador
The charity was premised on either:
- AGI being cheap to develop, or
- finding funders willing to risk billions for capped returns.
Neither happened. And I'm not sure the public would invest 100's of billions on the promise of AGI. I'm glad there are investors willing to take that chance. We all benefit either way if it is achieved.
FeepingCreature
"Neither happened"? I wasn't aware the OpenAI capped-profit corp had a funding problem?
frotaur
'We all benefit either way'?
I am not sure that making labour obsolete, and putting the replacement in the hands of a handful of investor will result in everybody benefiting.
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nroets
"Theft" means taking something from someone without consent. Who lost what ? There is no law suite, so maybe it's a donation ??
verdverm
The taxpayers / government. If they have been abusing their NP status to avoid taxes, they should have to back pay those.
khazhoux
What taxes are they not paying?
I am unable to find any concrete claim of specific tax avoidance. Only these exasperated “but taxes” comments.
asadotzler
Non-profits are literally tax-exempt. OAI spent 10 years being tax-exempt in exchange for doing work that fully benefits the public. Now that work, 10 years of tax exempt work, is being handed over to a taxable outfit, a for-profit organization. If the result of 10 years of tax-exempt efforts get handed to a for-profit company, the taxes that were never paid should be because the public benefit that got them the tax benefit wasn't fulfilled, in fact it was stolen and handed to ultra-wealthy capitalists.
next_xibalba
Surely they have never turned a profit and are a long way from being profitable. If so, what taxes, current or back, would they owe?
verdverm
Income taxes are not the only tax non-profits are exempted from. Sales and property taxes are others, depending on jurisdiction, California being one such state. I am not familiar if OpenAI-NP has been exempted from these
https://www.fplglaw.com/insights/california-nonprofit-law-es...
selectodude
The money they received was tax deductible for the people who “donated it”. They money should have been taxed as income for either the earner or OpenAI.
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wslh
This is the "everybody has a price" principle applied to organizations. One way to compare corruption across countries is by looking at the price you need to pay to override or bypass oversight, and how widely the resulting gains are distributed through the network.
binarymax
I want to understand this more, so can someone please ELI5 what the theft in the article actually is? Theft implies someone lost something. I think it's theft from the non-profit? But what does that mean? Is it theft of taxes because of the wealth accumulated in the non-profit was not taxed according to how it would have been for a for-profit entity?
EDIT: I'm not sure why I'm being downvoted. I read the article and it's not clear to me. The entire article is written with the assumption that the reader knows what the author is thinking.
joe_the_user
It seems like you're mixing "I don't understand X" with what's effectively an argument that X is false. Perhaps people feel that there's some bad faith in that approach.
Also, the article is very clear - the wealth transfer is moving the money/capital controlled by a non-profit to stockholders of a for-profit company. The non-profit lost that property, the share holders gained that property. It seems like taking an implicit assumption something like "the same people are running the for-profit on the same basis they ran the non-profit so where's the theft" - feel free to make that argument but mix the claim with "I don't understand" doesn't seem like a fair approach.
binarymax
I'm absolutely not arguing that X is false, because I don't know what X is, and I am arguing in good faith. I will follow up with the question: if the non-profit and the for-profit are owned by the same shareholders, what is the theft? Is this not a legal transfer between business entities?
I am also a somewhat harsh critic of Sam Altman (mostly around theft of IP used to train models, and around his odd obsession with gathering biometrics of people). So I'm honestly looking for answers here to understand, again, what wrongdoing is being done?
overvale
I'm not 100% clear myself but I think that the criticism is that what was supposed to be a non-profit delivering world-changing technology for the public good was bullied/manipulated into a for-profit entity that would enrich investors and consolidate power among the wealthy.
So the "theft" is the wealthy stealing the benefits of AGI from the people. I think.
bix6
Anyone else read Empire of AI? It left me pretty disgusted with openAI and Altman in particular. Curious if anyone has a rec for a book that is more positive in AIs benefits / the behavior of Sam / OAI?
Edit: downvoting why? Sama fanboys? Tell me your book rec then.
They should at least have to pay the max marginal tax rate on all the donations they got that could have been tax deductible. And any other tax benefit they received.