OpenAI has always said it’s a different kind of Big Tech titan, founded not just to rack up a stratospheric valuation of $400 billion (and counting), but also to “ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.”

The meteoric machine-learning firm announced itself to the world in a December 2015 press release that lays out a vision of technology to benefit all people as people, not citizens. There are neither good guys nor adversaries. “Our goal is to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole,” the announcement stated with confidence. “Since our research is free from financial obligations, we can better focus on a positive human impact.”

Early rhetoric from the company and its CEO, Sam Altman, described advanced artificial intelligence as a harbinger of a globalist utopia, a technology that wouldn’t be walled off by national or corporate boundaries but enjoyed together by the species that birthed it. In an early interview with Altman and fellow OpenAI co-founder Elon Musk, Altman described a vision of artificial intelligence “freely owned by the world” in common. When Vanity Fair asked in a 2015 interview why the company hadn’t set out as a for-profit venture, Altman replied: “I think that the misaligned incentives there would be suboptimal to the world as a whole.”

Times have changed. And OpenAI wants the White House to think it has too.

In a March 13 white paper submitted directly to the Trump administration, OpenAI’s global affairs chief Chris Lehane pitched a near future of AI built for the explicit purpose of maintaining American hegemony and thwarting the interests of its geopolitical competitors — specifically China. The policy paper’s mentions of freedom abound, but the proposal’s true byword is national security.

OpenAI never attempts to reconcile its full-throated support of American security with its claims to work for the whole planet, not a single country. After opening with a quotation from Trump’s own executive order on AI, the action plan proposes that the government create a direct line for the AI industry to reach the entire national security community, work with OpenAI “to develop custom models for national security,” and increase intelligence sharing between industry and spy agencies “to mitigate national security risks,” namely from China.

In the place of techno-globalism, OpenAI outlines a Cold Warrior exhortation to divide the world into camps. OpenAI will ally with those “countries who prefer to build AI on democratic rails,” and get them to commit to “deploy AI in line with democratic principles set out by the US government.”

The rhetoric seems pulled directly from the keyboard of an “America First” foreign policy hawk like Marco Rubio or Rep. Mike Gallagher, not a company whose website still endorses the goal of lifting up the whole world. The word “humanity,” in fact, never appears in the action plan.

Rather, the plan asks Trump, to whom Altman donated $1 million for his inauguration ceremony, to “ensure that American-led AI prevails over CCP-led AI” — the Chinese Communist Party — “securing both American leadership on AI and a brighter future for all Americans.”

It’s an inherently nationalist pitch: The concepts of “democratic values” and “democratic infrastructure” are both left largely undefined beyond their American-ness. What is democratic AI? American AI. What is American AI? The AI of freedom. And regulation of any kind, of course, “may hinder our economic competitiveness and undermine our national security,” Lehane writes, suggesting a total merging of corporate and national interests.

In an emailed statement, OpenAI spokesperson Liz Bourgeois declined to explain the company’s nationalist pivot but defended its national security work.

“We believe working closely with the U.S. government is critical to advancing our mission of ensuring AGI benefits all of humanity,” Bourgeois wrote. “The U.S. is uniquely positioned to help shape global norms around safe, secure, and broadly beneficial AI development—rooted in democratic values and international collaboration.”

The Intercept is currently suing OpenAI in federal court over the company’s use of copyrighted articles to train its chatbot ChatGPT.

OpenAI’s newfound patriotism is loud. But is it real?

In his 2015 interview with Musk, Altman spoke of artificial intelligence as a technology so special and so powerful that it ought to transcend national considerations. Pressed on OpenAI’s goal to share artificial intelligence technology globally rather than keeping it under domestic control, Altman provided an answer far more ambivalent than the company’s current day mega-patriotism: “If only one person gets to have it, how do you decide if that should be Google or the U.S. government or the Chinese government or ISIS or who?”

He also said, in the early days of OpenAI, that there may be limits to what his company might do for........

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