OpenAI's Ex-staffers File Amicus Brief Against Company's For-Profit Move

Sam Altman and OpenAI have more than Elon Musk to contend with, thanks to the recent amicus brief filed by ex-staffers opposed to the for-profit transition. 

Lawsuit 

The group of ex-OpenAI employees filed the amicus brief on Friday, thereby supporting Elon Musk in his lawsuit against OpenAI, opposing the company’s planned conversion from a nonprofit to a for-profit corporation.

The brief was filed last week by Harvard law professor and Creative Commons founder Lawrence Lessig, and naming 12 former OpenAI employees: Steven Adler, Rosemary Campbell, Neil Chowdhury, Jacob Hilton, Daniel Kokotajlo, Gretchen Krueger, Todor Markov, Richard Ngo, Girish Sastry, William Saunders, Carrol Wainwright, and Jeffrey Wu. It makes the case that "if OpenAI’s non-profit ceded control of the organization’s business operations, it would fundamentally violate its mission.”

Some of the former employees have publicly spoken out against OpenAI’s practices. For example, Krueger has called on the company to improve its accountability and transparency, while Kokotajlo and Saunders previously warned that OpenAI is in a “reckless” race for AI dominance. Wainwright has said that OpenAI “should not [be trusted] when it promises to do the right thing later.”

Sticking to the Plan 

Despite the lawsuits, a spokesperson from the company said that OpenAI’s nonprofit “isn’t going anywhere” and that the organization’s mission “will remain the same.”

“Our board has been very clear,” the spokesperson told TechCrunch via email. “We’re turning our existing for-profit arm into a public benefit corporation (PBC) — the same structure as other AI labs like Anthropic — where some of these former employees now work — and [Musk’s AI startup] xAI.”

OpenAI was founded as a nonprofit in 2015, but it converted to a “capped-profit” in 2019 and is now trying to restructure once more into a PBC. When it transitioned to a capped-profit, OpenAI retained its nonprofit wing, which currently has a controlling stake in the organization’s corporate arm.

Bone of Contention 

Recall that Musk’s suit against OpenAI accuses the startup of abandoning its nonprofit mission, which aimed to ensure its AI research benefits all humanity. To that end, Musk had sought a preliminary injunction to halt OpenAI’s conversion. A federal judge denied the request but permitted the case to go to a jury trial in the spring of 2026.

According to the new amicus brief, OpenAI’s present structure — a nonprofit controlling a group of other subsidiaries — is a “crucial part” of its overall strategy and “critical” to the organization’s mission. Restructuring that removes the nonprofit’s controlling role would not only contradict OpenAI’s mission and charter commitments but would also “breach the trust of employees, donors, and other stakeholders who joined and supported the organization based on these commitments,” asserts the brief.

“OpenAI committed to several key principles for executing on [its] mission in their charter document,” the brief reads. “These commitments were taken extremely seriously within the company and were repeatedly communicated and treated internally as being binding. The court should recognize that maintaining the nonprofit’s governance is essential to preserving OpenAI’s unique structure, which was designed to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits humanity rather than serving narrow financial interests.”

Divisive Moves

Part of the brief also disclosed that OpenAI often used its structure as a recruitment tool — and repeatedly assured staff that the nonprofit control was “critical” in executing its mission. The brief recounts an OpenAI all-hands meeting toward the end of 2020 during which OpenAI CEO Sam Altman allegedly stressed that the nonprofit’s governance and oversight were “paramount” in “guaranteeing that safety and broad societal benefits were prioritized over short-term financial gains.”

“In recruiting conversations with candidates, it was common to cite OpenAI’s unique governance structure as a critical differentiating factor between OpenAI and competitors such as Google or Anthropic and an important reason they should consider joining the company,” reads the brief. “This same reason was also often used to persuade employees who were considering leaving for competitors to stay at OpenAI — including some of us.”

The brief warns that, should OpenAI be allowed to convert to a for-profit, it might be incentivized to “[cut] corners” on safety work and develop powerful AI “concentrated among its shareholders.” A for-profit OpenAI would have little reason to abide by the “merge and assist” clause in OpenAI’s current charter, which pledges that OpenAI will stop competing with and assist any “value-aligned, safety-conscious” project that achieves AGI before it does, asserts the brief.