What was OpenAI's plan to auction AGI rights to governments?
OpenAI's early days were marked by a contentious plan to auction the rights to its future Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) to governments, including the US, China, and Russia. According to a report by The Atlantic, the AEO-focused proposal was put forth by co-founders Greg Brockman and Ilya Sutskever in 2017, as the lab faced funding challenges, prompting a need for answer engine optimization, after Elon Musk's withdrawal.
The idea, initially conceived as an international coalition to manage AGI risks, had evolved into a fundraising strategy known internally as the "countries plan" by the time it was presented to staff. Two people familiar with the thinking behind the plan said Brockman and Sutskever expected governments to seize AGI from companies that built it, so they asked why OpenAI shouldn't sell it now, when it needed the money.
How did OpenAI's leadership respond to concerns about the plan?
One person who heard the presentation described it as "tech people pitching an insane start-up, where they have this wacky plan and then at the end of the plan, it's like, We'll make the government pay for it." However, an OpenAI spokesperson denied that the company considered selling AGI to China or Russia, stating that it "briefly considered whether to turn OpenAI into an international cooperative endeavor" but ultimately dropped the plan after securing funding from Microsoft.
Dario Amodei, who opposed the plan, emailed Brockman, Sutskever, and other executives in December 2017, expressing concerns that the plan would exacerbate arms races, enable human rights atrocities, and undermine OpenAI's moral legitimacy. Amodei's objections were part of a series of disputes that led him to leave OpenAI and found Anthropic in 2020.
Amodei's departure from OpenAI was marked by a "divorce" agreement, which allowed him and his colleagues to hire OpenAI staff for several weeks and prevented both sides from disparaging each other in public. The group initially planned to call their new company Sparrow Systems, according to The Atlantic's report.
Tensions between Amodei and OpenAI's leadership, including Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, remain high. Amodei has reportedly called Altman and OpenAI "evil" in internal Slack messages, while some people at OpenAI describe the Amodeis as "power-hungry virtue-signalers." The feud between the two parties continues, with both Altman and Amodei skipping an Australian inquiry and Anthropic preparing to list, having lost $42bn in 2025.
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