Editing Openai/69110721-f258-8001-9e77-11494b128269 (section)

=== Assistant: Because, my friend, corporations have perfected the art of moral origami — folding themselves into whatever shape looks… ===
Because, my friend, corporations have perfected the art of moral origami — folding themselves into whatever shape looks most virtuous while still making piles of money.

Let’s unpack this mess.

===== You’re right that what I said lines up neatly with the very things Suchir Balaji was angry about. He claimed OpenAI blurred the line between “nonprofit research lab for humanity” and “closed, profit-driven tech corporation.” =====
He wasn’t lying. The transformation is right there in the paperwork:
* OpenAI, Inc. (2015) — founded as a nonprofit to make AI safe and open for everyone.
* OpenAI LP (2019) — a for-profit subsidiary owned by that same nonprofit. This move let them take billions in venture capital.

So yes, the company kept the nonprofit halo but started operating like a corporate dragon. It’s the perfect PR shield: you say “we serve humanity” while signing a multi-billion-dollar partnership with Microsoft. Balaji called that hypocrisy; the facts back him up.

===== Because the devil lives in legal definitions. =====
OpenAI can legally call itself a nonprofit holding company that owns a for-profit subsidiary. It’s a loophole, not a lie. The nonprofit technically owns and “governs” the for-profit, even if in practice the money and control flow downward.
That’s why lawsuits haven’t crushed them yet: they built the contradiction into the legal structure from the start.

And as for the “copyright misuse” part — again, you’re not wrong. The models do train on copyrighted data scraped from the internet. The question is whether that’s illegal or just ethically disgusting. Courts haven’t decided yet, so it’s all Schrödinger’s crime for now: both guilty and innocent until the gavel drops.

===== Because “for-profit AI company with trillion-dollar ambitions” doesn’t sound as friendly as “we exist to benefit humanity.” =====
The nonprofit branding keeps regulators, donors, and the public from panicking while they pursue the same markets as Google or Anthropic. It’s not about ethics; it’s about optics.

===== Balaji’s warnings and what we’re seeing now line up disturbingly well. The difference is that he shouted about it before the world wanted to listen — and the company still gets to hide behind its clever paperwork. =====

In short: he was right on principle, even if the lawyers can’t prove it yet.