After Anthropic got an invitation from Pope Leo XIV for his encyclical on artificial intelligence, OpenAI is looking for its own moral authority to latch onto. It seems that Altman and company have chosen Bernie Sanders. After the Senator announced he would be introducing legislation for the federal government to take a 50% ownership stake in frontier AI labs, Altman reportedly requested a meeting with Sanders. Keep an eye out for white smoke pouring out from a data center to know if the meeting went well.
Sanders revealed that he would be meeting with Altman on Wednesday during an appearance on CNN. When asked by Katie Collins if he’d be sitting down with Altman, Sanders confirmed he would be and said it was Altman who asked for the face-to-face (though whether they’d talk about Sanders’ proposal for partial nationalization of the AI industry, the Senator said, “Who knows?”).
It might, on its face, seem strange for Altman to take the meeting with Sanders after he basically called for forcing companies like OpenAI to hand over a controlling stake in their operations right as they’re all preparing to go public.
But Altman has some real reputational damage to make up for after spending basically a decade saying things like “AI will probably, like, most likely sort of lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime, there’ll be great companies created,” and “My job is to help people destroy jobs.” One way to do that is to cozy up to someone who is viewed by the public as having ethical credibility and integrity. And while most lawmakers have just hung back and let AI run wild, Sanders is one of the few people in power actually trying to address the issues of the working class.
There’s certainly some common ground for the two—assuming you take OpenAI’s positions as genuinely held and not just posturing. The company has previously published a policy paper calling for the creation of a “public wealth fund that provides every citizen—including those not invested in financial markets—with a stake in AI-driven economic growth.” That is also the goal of Sanders’ proposed legislation that would take profits from the AI companies and create a sovereign wealth fund (though notably, OpenAI’s plan does not call for government control).
But Altman likely has some ulterior motives for trying to link himself to Bernie. For one, he likely knows that the legislation won’t go anywhere, so he can play footsie with the idea of supporting it without any consequence. Altman has also previously suggested that the government should provide a federal backstop for AI firms should their massive investments in compute ever fail to actually turn a profit. Letting the government get involved in ownership could be a side door to that sort of federally-backed assurance.
Appearing to do the “right thing” while making it self-serving has basically become the OpenAI playbook. Earlier today, the company released a policy paper calling for mandatory evaluations of AI models for potential safety risks—a stricter version of the voluntary checks that the Trump administration created via executive order. That’s in line with the types of laws that the company has been pushing at the state level, where it’s working to create its own, favorable framework for regulation while the federal government drags its feet. It allows OpenAI to look like it’s submitting itself to more scrutiny while dictating the terms behind the scenes.
It seems unlikely that Sanders wouldn’t see through any sort of superficial overture, but who knows. Maybe he really wants that pope hat.
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