Sam Altman and Dario Amodei with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the opening of the India AI Impact Summit in New Delhi, 19 February 2026. Credit: Prime Minister’s Office (GODL-India) via Wikimedia Commons (cropped) In 2017, OpenAI co-founders Greg Brockman and Ilya Sutskever proposed auctioning the rights to the company’s future AGI to governments, including the US, China and Russia. Kevin Roose reports the plan in an excerpt from his book, published by The Atlantic on Tuesday. Dario Amodei opposed it.
It was one of several disputes that led him to leave and found Anthropic, Roose writes. The excerpt, published in The Atlantic, comes from Roose’s forthcoming book, The AGI Chronicles. Five people familiar with the plan described it to him. The ‘countries plan’ The idea came as Elon Musk was pulling away from OpenAI and the lab needed new funding, Roose writes.
It began as a proposal for an international coalition to manage the risks of AGI. By the time Brockman and Sutskever presented it to staff that winter, it had become a fundraising strategy known internally as the “countries plan”. Two people familiar with their thinking said the pair expected governments to seize AGI from the companies that built it. So they asked why OpenAI should not sell it now, when it needed the money. “It sounded like tech people pitching an insane start-up, where they have this wacky plan and then at the end of the plan, it’s like, We’ll make the government pay for it,” one person who heard the presentation told Roose.
OpenAI “briefly considered whether to turn OpenAI into an international cooperative endeavor” but “did not consider selling AGI to China or Russia,” an OpenAI spokesperson told Roose. OpenAI dropped the plan after it found funding from Microsoft. In December 2017, Amodei emailed Brockman, Sutskever and other executives to object, according to the excerpt. “In my opinion this plan would exacerbate rather than reduce arms races, would potentially enable human rights atrocities… and would undermine OpenAI’s moral legitimacy,” Amodei wrote. Kanye West and the GPT-3 beta Amodei kept a list of times he felt Altman had misled him, Roose writes.
One concerned a list of approved GPT-3 customers. Another concerned safety terms in the $1bn Microsoft deal. In 2020, Altman offered Kanye West access to the private GPT-3 beta, two people told Roose. Jack Clark, then OpenAI’s policy director, stopped it.
That year, Amodei and six colleagues left to start Anthropic. They called the exit terms “the divorce”. The group could hire OpenAI staff for several weeks, and both sides agreed not to disparage each other in public. The company first planned to call itself Sparrow Systems, according to the excerpt.
Still feuding Dario and Daniela Amodei “still despise” Altman and Brockman, according to several people who know them, Roose writes. Dario has called Altman and OpenAI “evil” in internal Slack messages. Some people at OpenAI describe the Amodeis as “power-hungry virtue-signalers”, the excerpt says. On Monday, TNW reported that Altman and Amodei will both skip an Australian inquiry.
Anthropic is preparing to list, and its prospectus shows it lost $42bn in 2025. On Wednesday, Brockman dropped a $25m pledge to an AI super PAC.
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