is The Verge’s senior AI reporter. An AI beat reporter for more than five years, her work has also appeared in CNBC, MIT Technology Review, Wired UK, and other outlets.
On August 19th at 7:07PM, Tyler Johnston received a message from his roommate. A man, the text said, was knocking on their door with legal documents to serve.
Johnston is the founder and sole employee of The Midas Project: a nonprofit that monitors the practices of “leading AI companies to ensure transparency, privacy, and ethical standards are maintained.” The Midas Project is behind The OpenAI Files, a 50-page report about OpenAI’s evolution from under-the-radar nonprofit to moneymaking household name. It organized an open letter to OpenAI asking for transparency about its transition to a for-profit company, garnering more than 10,000 signatures. Now, apparently, OpenAI was striking back.
Johnston was traveling in California at the time, but he quickly learned that OpenAI had hired a process server from an Oklahoma-based firm called Smoking Gun Investigations, LLC, whose website featured a smoking pistol and the tagline, “A bitter truth is better than the sweetest lies.” Two 15-page subpoenas ended up being delivered by email: one to The Midas Project, the other to Johnston personally. The documents suggested The Midas Project was a catspaw of OpenAI’s longtime rival Elon Musk — dragging the nonprofit into a bitter lawsuit between the pair.
Johnston wasn’t surprised that OpenAI’s lawyers had come calling, he told The Verge in an interview. But the “egregious” breadth of the subpoenas surprised him. OpenAI wasn’t just demanding to know whether his tiny nonprofit had gotten funding from Musk. It wanted to know all of its funding sources, right down to when and how much donors contributed. And it wanted the nonprofit to turn over any documents and communications related to OpenAI’s governance and structure and any potential changes to it.
“I didn’t mind if they asked if we were funded by Musk,” Johnston said. “But they could’ve looked up our form 990 and seen we brought in less than $75,000 last year. If Musk were funding us, he’d have to be very thrifty about it.”
Johnston’s experience isn’t unique. In recent months, OpenAI has subpoenaed a wide range of nonprofits that have been critical of the company’s controversial for-profit restructuring. Ostensibly, the subpoenas are supposed to help OpenAI build its defense against Musk, who sued to stop the company’s transition. But in practice, recipients and legal experts say, they seem more like a campaign of intimidation with very real costs. Online controversy has roiled OpenAI, with current and former employees publicly criticizing the company’s legal tactics. And at a time when AI companies are garnering unprecedented money and power, the subpoenas call attention to OpenAI’s ongoing departure from its nonprofit roots.
“At what is possibly a risk to my whole career I will say: this doesn’t seem great.”
OpenAI did not provide a comment by publication time. A company executive has previously said on X that there was “a lot more to the story” than the nonprofits claim.
So far, at least seven nonprofits have revealed that they received subpoenas, including the San Francisco Foundation, Encode, Ekō, the Future of Life Institute, Legal Advocates for Safe Science and Technology, and the Coalition for AI Nonprofit Integrity. Many of the subpoenas seem to request not only answers to whether the nonprofits are involved with or funded by Musk in any way, but also every entity that has ever financially supported the nonprofits, as well as every one of the nonprofits’ documents and communications related to OpenAI’s own restructuring. The requests were wide-ranging enough to bury some of the nonprofits with paperwork and legal fees.
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