A man who works at an AI watchdog group was alarmed when OpenAI suddenly showed up at his doorstep last fall, demanding he turn over documents. To his utter disbelief, he was being subpoenaed.
“It’s a bit scary to know that the most valuable private company in the world has your address and has shown up and has questions for you,” the man, Tyler Johnston, who founded the nonprofit advocacy group The Midas Project, said in a new interview with A More Perfect Union.
“They were asking for every former employee we had spoken to and what we said to them,” he added. “Every congressional office that we spoke to, every potential investor that we spoke to.”
Johnston wasn’t alone. In all, NBC News reported last October that at least seven nonprofits that had been critical of OpenAI were served with subpoenas around the time of reporting, as part of a lawsuit between OpenAI and Elon Musk.
Later the same October that Johnston was subpoenaed, OpenAI completed its restructuring into a for-profit public benefit corporation, a move that was over a year and a half in the making. It had been challenged at every turn by Microsoft, which had invested billions of dollars into the startup, and Musk, who cofounded OpenAI but left the company in 2018 reportedly over disagreements with Altman, and who was now suing it for abandoning its original altruist mission of building open source models.
As the suit dragged out, a paranoid-sounding OpenAI began accusing its critics of being funded by Musk. And that’s how representatives from the company ended up at Johnston’s house.
“They wanted every single text message and document that we had that in any way related to OpenAI’s restructuring,” he told Perfect Union.
The subpoenas also came as OpenAI and other tech companies worked to shoot down a California bill that would’ve required the companies to restrict minors’ access to their AI models unless they could demonstrate their guardrails prevented the bot from promoting self-harm and other dangerous topics. With its restructuring on the line, and under threat of being subjected to powerful regulation, OpenAI had every reason to be more conscious of its image than ever. (Governor Gavin Newsom eventually vetoed the bill, and a weaker version of the legislation was enacted instead.)
As other AI watchdogs came forward to share how OpenAI had subpoenaed them as well, Johnston confronted its chief strategy officer Jason Kwon, who made a post on X accusing The Midas Project of having “suddenly” formed around when Musk sued OpenAI, arguing this raised “transparency questions.”
“What are you talking about?” wrote an exasperated Johnston. “We were formed 19 months ago. We’ve never spoken with or taken funding from Musk and ilk, which we would have been happy to tell you if you asked a single time.”
“In fact,” he added, “we’ve said he runs xAI so horridly it makes OpenAI ‘saintly in comparison.’”
Weeks later, Johnston revealed how the news coverage of how his organization had gotten dragged into the lawsuit caused insurance brokers to refuse to cover his nonprofit.
“If you wanted to constrain an org’s speech, intimidation would be one strategy, but making them uninsurable is another, and maybe that’s what’s happened to us with this subpoena,” he said.
Now, he’s sounding more jaded than ever about the lengths that companies like OpenAI will go to to protect themselves. “The AI industry broadly is ready to play hardball,” he said in the interview.
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