OpenAI CEO Sam Altman outlines five guiding principles framing the company's business strategy and approach to AI development

Sam Altman published a post titled 'Our principles' laying out five guiding principles for OpenAI: democratization, empowerment, universal prosperity, resilience, and adaptability. The central premise is that power over superintelligence will either be concentrated among a few companies or distributed among the people, with OpenAI stating it is aiming for the latter.

The principles justify specific business decisions, including massive compute purchases despite relatively modest revenue, vertical integration, and building data centers around the world. Altman argues the cost of AI infrastructure needs to drop dramatically and suggests governments may need to explore new economic models to distribute the value AI creates more broadly.

Altman acknowledges OpenAI may need to collaborate with governments, international agencies, and other AGI projects to solve alignment, safety, or societal problems before moving forward. He explicitly reserves the right to change course, citing the debate over releasing GPT-2 weights as a case study where initial concerns turned out to be overblown but led to the iterative deployment strategy.