Sanders: Government should break up OpenAI
82 comments
·November 1, 2025ford
DarkNova6
> The only future where the US maintains its relative success involves American leadership in AI and robotics, with humans supporting them
I never understood this take. It strikes me more as "faith in our lord and savior AI" without actual evidence to support this.
CamperBob2
Almost every advantage we have over every other country, we owe to technology. (Well, that and a couple of oceans, I suppose.) Historically, Americans have been better at taking every possible advantage of automation, computation, and tech in general than anyone else.
Do you expect that to change, and if so, how?
bix6
So why don’t we build some damn factories then? Our infrastructure stack is woefully outdated and yet all we seem to be funding is AI and other SaaS.
bigyabai
> we owe to technology
That, and the American economy's pernicious habit for making money doing nothing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financialization
When will that become problematic, you tell me...
maplethorpe
Not all technology is adopted equally, though. Traditionally we pick and choose which technologies to adopt based on their usefulness and efficiency, rather than adopting absolutely everything because it falls under the banner of "technology".
BrenBarn
That doesn't mean that technology has to be shoveled out to the public by the truckload. A country can have a productive pharmaceutical industry without being full of drug addicts. Also, there can be technological advances without having them concentrated in a small number of companies.
idiotsecant
The most productive countries are the most prosperous for the owner class. Ask a random citizen from West Virginia how much they've benefited from the market share of Nvidia increasing
_DeadFred_
Ah yes, the magic job fairy. Because there were jobs in the past, there will be jobs in the future.
There were also skid rows after industrialization in the US. Lots of people didn't make it out of them to the post ww2 jobs everyone thinks about when they say 'industrialization brought good jobs'.
There were also flop houses post industrialization, where you could rent yourself your own section of rope to lean on for the night.
But yep, after WW2 there were lots of jobs in the US. When did industrialization happen though? Why do we ignore all those that didn't make it out of skid row/flop houses and jump to an implied 1940s+ jobs market?
meowface
I don't think the person you were replying to was necessarily strongly implying that many or perhaps most Americans wouldn't become permanently unemployed or unemployable.
Hamstringing productivity and technology because of possible job loss - even loss of nearly all jobs, yes - just is not a sensible move. Moves certainly need to be made, but the best action is definitely not deindustrialization and degrowth and luddism. The dock worker unions demanding a ban on port automation is a microcosm of how we will slowly decay as a country.
Even the smart communists understand this. The goal should be wellbeing and prosperity and lack of scarcity for all. The end goal is not "ensure everyone can do these painstaking jobs which non-humans can do exponentially better and faster and cheaper". This is an artificial goal because of vague worries about "purpose". Yes, people need purpose, but placing objects onto locations or pressing buttons on a screen is not the pinnacle of what it means to be a sentient entity.
biophysboy
My best case scenario for AI is that it becomes a dirt cheap commodity. If the hyperscalers pour trillions into it, fail to build a moat around it, and end up giving newcomers the tools to replace them, that would be absolutely fantastic.
pelorat
Break up into what? They have one product.
nickff
And the one product is made up of two components (training and inference) which are each extremely competitive, undifferentiated, and losing money.
kronicum2025
Break it off from Microsoft definitely. Same with Github I think.
mattlutze
Bell also "just" provided telephone service, but had a nation-wide practical monopoly, and so was broken up into different regional operators.
The US has since gotten bad at dealing with companies like this. A company like Google or Amazon could/should be broken up into a few parts and would likely result in those parts together being worth more than when it was just the one company, and more competition in each industry.
Too early and the break-up can kill innovation. Too late and the company will have been a rent-seeking operation for so long that it chokes out dynamism.
It might be too early for OpenAI, but we shouldn't wait until they own all of the next Internet in the way Facebook, Google and Amazon ended up.
tptacek
Yeah: it had a nationwide monopoly. Breaking up the Bells meant breaking that monopoly. That was the public policy goal of forcibly reorganizing the company.
How do you apply that to the OpenAI case? You have to draw the rest of the owl here.
pinnochio
You don't seem to have read the comment you're replying to carefully enough.
XorNot
This is Bernie Sanders trying to do populism on a subject he doesn't know much about.
gaindustries
[dead]
pinnochio
No, they don't? Sora is a separate product, and they're working on a social media platform. And that thing with Jony Ive. Other things, too, that I'm sure I'm forgetting.
At any rate, this looks like they made a headline out of a passing comment. I wouldn't read too much into it.
Edit: lol at the AI bros downvoting facts.
sothatsit
Break ups are for monopolies, not for startups. This makes no sense.
If Bernie just wants to slow down automation then breaking up OpenAI is not the way to do it.
conception
“Startup”.
sothatsit
"Not well-established company with no profit and lots of competition" doesn't quite roll off the tongue.
tptacek
What's your point? What do you think Sanders thinks we should break OpenAI into? What N new companies do you think he thinks we should create?
DarkNova6
It is quite preposterous to claim that "OpenAI" is a "startup". Neither is it "Open" while we are at it.
bix6
Well let’s see the Amodei siblings left and we got Anthropic. Ilya left and we got SSI. Mira left and we got Thinking Machines. So it seems we can break it up and actually get even more innovation!
Protostome
Not him again ...
zug_zug
I'm not sure if I understand how a break-up would work, but the sentiment that government be ready to nationalize or otherwise prevent a single company from potentially disrupting the whole economy seems obvious.
Perhaps it would look like this -- if you replace a worker with AI then you must still pay minimum wage straight into a public benefit tax.
whatpeoplewant
Breaking up OpenAI might tackle concentration, but bigger leverage is interoperability and transparency across compute, model, and orchestration layers so no single vendor controls agentic LLM workflows. As the field shifts toward multi-agent, distributed agentic AI (including parallel agentic AI), policy should prioritize open agent protocols, auditable sandboxes, and portable evals/policies. That preserves competition while addressing system-level risks (emergent behavior, cascading failures) that arise specifically in agentic AI more than in single-model deployments.
ford
IMO the only concentration OpenAI has is brand. Anthropic & Gemini both have roughly equivalent models. This could change quickly since success compounds, but for now I am actually somewhat surprised at how competitive LLM labs are with each other.
nradov
That might make sense to mandate years from now but the industry is still evolving way too rapidly for standards based interoperability to be practical. Let's maybe take a look at that in 10 years.
_DeadFred_
AI is a natural fit to be provided through libraries.
rvz
Reality: We need to reach AGI first (which means IPO at $1T and then sell our shares on the public market) before we can have discussions about a break up.
meowface
Unpopular opinion here but I don't see any benefit in breaking up goliaths like Microsoft, Google, Amazon, OpenAI.
OpenAI (optically) came out of nowhere and took over everything in a few years. A future company also could. We should punish violation of regulations and the law when it occurs. We don't need to be interfering just because we feel a company is too good at being a company.
If OpenAI violated anything with the recent non-profit stuff, sue or charge them.
bix6
You don’t see a single benefit? You think monopoly power is worthwhile?
meowface
As long as it's not a monopoly that is effectively impossible to beat: yes, I do.
I broadly consider myself left-wing but I think the libertarians are kind of right on that point.
pedalpete
Don't know why you are getting downvoted, it is a legitimate question.
Yes, monopoly power is worthwhile. It's abusing monopoly power which is illegal.
I don't see OpenAI abusing a monopoly. If Sanders is looking to the future and saying "they may do that one day", well, that's like saying someone might commit murder one day, so we should put them in jail now.
It doesn't work that way.
Just to be clear, I'm actually a fan of Bernie Sanders. Though, I'm not American, so it doesn't really matter.
nradov
There don't seem to be any substantial federal legal issues in OpenAI converting one of its units from a non-profit to a for-profit corporation. This is almost entirely a state issue, and OpenAI was able to get the California state government to go along with the plan by threatening to move to another state. For better or worse that's the way our dual sovereignty federal system works.
crabmusket
> We should punish violation of regulations and the law when it occurs
The law includes regulations around competition and monopoly which companies frequently violate, and the consequences can sometimes be as severe as getting "broken up".
I don't think Bernie's on to anything here, but competition law is good actually.
meowface
If a company is consistently abusing its status as a monopoly, punishment should ensue. But simply being a monopoly can mean you simply outcompeted everyone else and others fail to outcompete you. You might continue winning fair and square.
BrenBarn
> A future company also could.
Then they should be broken up too.
> We don't need to be interfering just because we feel a company is too good at being a company.
We absolutely do, because "being good at being a company" has become a sort of paperclip-maximizing game that is pretty well divorced from anything beneficial to society.
meowface
>We absolutely do, because "being good at being a company" has become a sort of paperclip-maximizing game that is pretty well divorced from anything beneficial to society.
I doubt that that's true. In some cases at some companies, but I wouldn't be surprised if harm to society is per capita more likely at non-monopolies than at monopolies.
smt88
The other companies you mentioned are making more money from AI than OpenAI is. And Microsoft owns a huge chunk of OpenAI too.
IshKebab
I agree. Consumer-friendly regulation is much more valuable.
Also it remains to be seen how long OpenAI will even survive. They are losing a ton of money and don't really have much of a moat.
bigyabai
They should have broken up Google and Apple too. These businesses are too deeply-entwined with the federal government to properly (let alone fairly) prosecuted.
lazide
Why would the government break up an entity that is incredibly useful to them as-is?
bigyabai
Ideally, social unrest would force antitrust action before their monopoly efforts were usable for censorship or surveillance.
wslh
Has Sanders worked on that?
tptacek
I think this is more a branding statement than an actual policy proposal. Breaking up OpenAI doesn't make any sense, not merely because it has intense competition, but also because it doesn't have meaningful internal business units whose collusion cause public policy problems.
Really, what he's saying is "OpenAI should make and spend less money". The honest policy proposal there is to tax the bejeezus out of it.
But Sanders has, for reasons I don't really understand, gone all in on a modern antitrust branding around "oligarchy", so that all his statements about excessive corporate power have to be about restructuring companies, rather than exercising the full portfolio of powers the government has to influence the economy.
You saw something similar a few days ago from Elizabeth Warren, who reacted to the UE1 outage by saying we should break up AWS. Not Amazon: AWS. Like, RDS and S3 should be different companies. That's not real; whether or not she understood what she was saying, she didn't mean it. What she means is she doesn't like huge corporations (fair enough).
It's annoying to have to read between the lines on these people, but I guess that's always been politics.
The argument sounds like he believes AI (+ robotics) will take jobs, and breaking up OpenAI could slow it down
Historically the most productive countries are the most prosperous - I think there is a big landscape of local maxima/minima in how healthy & happy a country/economy is, but shunning new technology has never been the path to Quality of Life. The only future where the US maintains its relative success involves American leadership in AI and robotics, with humans supporting them