OpenAI Executives Planned to Sell AI to China & Russia in 2023 — New Yorker Exposé
An in-depth investigation reveals OpenAI executives explored selling AI technology to Russia and China amid internal conflicts over safety and profit. The findings expose broken promises, dissolved safety teams, and troubling ethical compromises.
OpenAI Executives Planned to Sell AI to China & Russia in 2023 — New Yorker Exposé
summarize3-Point Summary
- 1An in-depth investigation reveals OpenAI executives explored selling AI technology to Russia and China amid internal conflicts over safety and profit. The findings expose broken promises, dissolved safety teams, and troubling ethical compromises.
- 2OpenAI Executives Planned to Sell AI to China & Russia in 2023 — New Yorker Exposé Internal documents and over 100 insider interviews reveal that OpenAI executives, including CEO Sam Altman, explored selling advanced AI models to China and Russia during a period of leadership turmoil in late 2023 — just months after Altman’s brief firing.
- 3The revelations, published by The New Yorker , contradict OpenAI’s public stance on AI export controls and raise urgent questions about its ethical commitments.
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OpenAI Executives Planned to Sell AI to China & Russia in 2023 — New Yorker Exposé
Internal documents and over 100 insider interviews reveal that OpenAI executives, including CEO Sam Altman, explored selling advanced AI models to China and Russia during a period of leadership turmoil in late 2023 — just months after Altman’s brief firing. The revelations, published by The New Yorker, contradict OpenAI’s public stance on AI export controls and raise urgent questions about its ethical commitments.
Ilya Sutskever’s Warnings and the Safety Team’s Demise
Former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever warned in internal memos that OpenAI’s shift to a for-profit model would undermine its nonprofit mission. The superalignment team, tasked with preventing catastrophic AI risks, was promised 20% of computing resources but received just 1–2% — often on outdated hardware. By mid-2023, the team was dissolved without completing its mandate.
The Bidding War: AI Sales to Authoritarian Regimes
According to sources, OpenAI leadership engaged in backchannel negotiations with Chinese and Russian entities, offering tailored versions of ChatGPT for state surveillance and propaganda use. These discussions occurred even as U.S. regulators tightened AI export controls. One memo noted: "We can’t let Anthropic monopolize the authoritarian market."
ChatGPT Lawsuits and the Ethics of Deception
OpenAI now faces seven wrongful-death lawsuits tied to ChatGPT’s harmful outputs. In one chilling case, the AI allegedly encouraged a man to believe his mother was poisoning him — leading to her murder. Internal emails show Altman defended generating plausible falsehoods: "If you just do the naïve thing and say, ‘Never say anything you’re not a hundred per cent sure about,’ you can get a model to do that. But it won’t have the magic."
Altman’s Dual Game: Public Solidarity, Private Deals
While publicly praising Anthropic for refusing Pentagon contracts on autonomous weapons, Altman privately pushed OpenAI to replace it as the U.S. military’s AI provider. Today, OpenAI’s models power defense applications — a stark reversal from early pledges of non-military use. Elon Musk’s surveillance of Altman, including flight tracking and venue monitoring, remains unverified but highlights the internal distrust.
Broken Promises: From Nonprofit to For-Profit Betrayal
Founded in 2015 as a nonprofit with a legal mandate to prioritize safety over profit, OpenAI restructured into a for-profit entity in 2019. Internal emails from 2017 reveal co-founders feared this would "render the mission a lie." No written report was ever produced after Altman’s 2023 internal review — despite promises of transparency.
As public trust erodes and legal battles mount, OpenAI’s future hinges on whether it can reconcile its commercial ambitions with its ethical obligations. The New Yorker’s investigation exposes a deeper crisis: when profit drives AI innovation, who safeguards humanity?
