Encode, a nonprofit organization that co-sponsored California’s failed SB 1047 AI safety legislation, is joining forces with Elon Musk to oppose OpenAI’s plan to repivot as a fully for-profit company.

The youth-led advocacy group that represents people in dozens of countries said today it’s filing an amicus brief in support of SpaceX Corp. and Tesla Inc. founder Musk’s ongoing lawsuit, which aims to prevent OpenAI’s metamorphosis. The filing is supported by one of the most prominent individuals in the artificial intelligence industry, the Nobel and Turing prize-winner Geoffrey Hinton (pictured), who is often referred to as the “Godfather of AI”.

In its brief, Encode argues that OpenAI’s restructuring would undermine its longheld commitment to prioritize public safety when developing advanced AI systems. It adds that OpenAI’s status as a nonprofit provides “essential governance guardrails” that would effectively be eliminated if the company were to transition to a for-profit entity. Instead of being committed to prioritize the interests of humanity, it says it would be legally compelled to balance public benefit with the interests of its investors.

“OpenAI was founded as an explicitly safety-focused non-profit and made a variety of safety-related promises in its charter,” Hinton said in a statement. “It received numerous tax and other benefits from its non-profit status. Allowing it to tear all of that up when it becomes inconvenient sends a very bad message to other actors in the ecosystem.”

Hinton recently told BBC Radio 4 that he thinks there is a “10% to 20% chance” that AI could cause the extinction of humanity within the next 30 years, in what appears to be an effort to remind the industry of the need for safeguards when developing the technology.

OpenAI’s current legal structure, as a for-profit company controlled by a nonprofit board of directors, places restrictions on its mission and hinders its ability to raise funding and compensate investors for backing it. It formally announced its intention to restructure itself as a traditional for-profit corporation last week, though its plans to do so had been known for some time already.

Musk was one of the first to anticipate OpenAI’s move and filed a preliminary injunction that aims to stop it from doing so in November. He has since garnered support from Meta Platforms Inc. and its founder Mark Zuckerberg. Last month, Meta wrote in a letter to California Attorney General Rob Bonta that allowing OpenAI to transform itself would “set a dangerous precedent” that would have “seismic implications” for the technology industry.

In its brief, Encode questions whether a for-profit company would be able to fulfill OpenAI’s pledge to “stop competing with and start assisting” any value-aligned organizations that appear close to building “artificial general intelligence” before it does so itself.

“Today, a handful of companies are racing to develop and deploy transformative AI, internalizing the profits but externalizing the consequences to all of humanity,” said Encode’s founder and president Sneha Revanur. “The courts must intervene to ensure AI development serves the public interest.”

OpenAI has urged the court to reject Musk’s lawsuit, and has argued that he “lacks standing” and is only seeking to gain a competitive advantage for his own AI startup, xAI Corp. To back up its claims, OpenAI released a trove of email communications between Musk and its senior executives and founders, demonstrating that Musk himself advocated for the company to become a for-profit organization as early as 2017.

Photo: University of Toronto/YouTube