OpenAI Staffers Are Funding a Rival Super PAC to Take on Their Boss
A group of rank-and-file OpenAI employees have donated more than $215,000 to a super PAC pushing for stricter regulations on frontier AI labs. Guardrails Alliance
A group of rank-and-file OpenAI employees have donated more than $215,000 to a super PAC pushing for stricter regulations on frontier AI labs. Guardrails Alliance, which launched last month with $5 million in total initial funding, bills itself as a populist effort supported by tech workers, labor unions, and other groups. It’s aiming to be a counterweight to Leading the Future, a pro-AI industry super PAC bankrolled with more than $100 million from technology industry leaders, including OpenAI president and cofounder Greg Brockman. Seven current OpenAI employees have donated to Guardrails Alliance, as well as one former employee, WIRED has learned. The super PAC exclusively shared some of its donors with WIRED before its first quarterly filing with the Federal Election Commission is made public on July 15. Two OpenAI employees are expected to appear in that filing, while five more are scheduled to be named in Guardrails Alliance’s future disclosures. One of the largest donations from an OpenAI employee came from Juan Felipe Cerón Uribe, who gave $200,000 to the political spending group.
Cerón Uribe, who has been a research engineer at OpenAI since 2022, tells WIRED he spent the last four years working on the company’s strategies for mitigating potential societal harms caused by AI. “In this time, I’ve become concerned that all that research will have gone to waste if it doesn’t translate to guardrails that hold private companies accountable for the responsible development of AI,” Cerón Uribe said in a statement. “Tech billionaires, such as Greg Brockman, funded the super PAC Leading the Future to keep AI unregulated. I was very happy to learn that Guardrails Alliance is pushing back against LTF; my decision to donate to them was easy.” Contributions from current and former OpenAI employees make up a small portion of Guardrails Alliance’s larger goal to raise $15 million this election cycle. They are also paltry compared to the $50 million commitment Brockman and his wife Anna have made to Leading the Future. But regardless of their size, the donations from OpenAI’s rank-and-file workers highlight growing tensions inside the company over its efforts to shape AI policy.
Brockman’s donations to Leading the Future have sparked concern among some OpenAI employees, who have pressed executives to explain the company’s ties to the super PAC. OpenAI leaders have since tried to distance themselves from the group, but now some workers are using their own money to directly counter Leading the Future. Shaunna Thomas, a cofounder of Guardrails Alliance, says she’s not concerned about the financial disparity between her group and the opposition. “Getting to $15 million enables us to follow Leading the Future into more [political] races,” Thomas, a longtime Democratic political organizer, said in an interview with WIRED. “But we’re not going to match our opponents dollar-for-dollar, we don’t have to. When you expose what the AI PACs are doing, the people reject it. We’re leveraging public opinion that already exists, and it’s less expensive to do that.” After seeing Leading the Future’s launch last year, Thomas says she realized that politicians proposing new regulations on the AI industry would “have a very hard time advancing that conversation when they have a $100 million threat hanging over them.” Leading the Future, which launched last summer with Brockman as one of the super PAC’s marquee supporters, has said its goal is to “oppose policies that stifle innovation” and figures who “who support that agenda." Among the PAC’s first political efforts was an attempt to sink the congressional campaign of Alex Bores, the author of New York’s landmark AI safety law, who ultimately lost in a primary election last month.
The BriefWire