The evolution of OpenAI’s mission statement.
OpenAI, the maker of the most popular AI chatbot, used to say it aimed to build artificial intelligence that “safely benefits humanity, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return,” according to its 2023 mission statement. But the ChatGPT maker seems to no longer have the same emphasis on doing so “safely.”
While reviewing its latest IRS disclosure form, which was released in November 2025 and covers 2024, I noticed OpenAI had removed “safely” from its mission statement, among other changes. That change in wording coincided with its transformation from a nonprofit organization into a business increasingly focused on profits.
OpenAI currently faces several lawsuits related to its products’ safety, making this change newsworthy. Many of the plaintiffs suing the AI company allege psychological manipulation, wrongful death and assisted suicide, while others have filed negligence claims.
As a scholar of nonprofit accountability and the governance of social enterprises, I see the deletion of the word “safely” from its mission statement as a significant shift that has largely gone unreported – outside highly specialized outlets.
And I believe OpenAI’s makeover is a test case for how we, as a society, oversee the work of organizations that have the potential to both provide enormous benefits and do catastrophic harm.
The Borg from Star Trek fills that requirement. My headcanon is that the people from its home planet made an AGI with the given goal of “benefiting humanity as a whole”, and it maximised that goal by building the Borg - making humanity as a whole by connecting them to a hive mind and forcibly assimilating all other species to benefit humanity as a whole.
So can we expect ChatGPT to become a shareholder hive mind then?
Oh what a cool take!
I always liked to think of the Borg as being almost more like an emergent property of a certain level and type of organic/inorganic interfacing.
So it’s not that one species was the Borg, all are in potentia. And every time a species commits the same error or reaches the correct level of “perfection”, they find themselves in a universe where they were already existent.
Like a small hive self-creates, opens its mental ears and is already subsumed into the greater Borg whose mind it finds.
I like that it adds almost a whole new level of arrogance to their statement, “Resistance is futile.” They believe it not only because they are about to physically assimilate you, but because every advance you make brings you potentially closer to being Borg through your own missteps.
Gotta be honest, I thought that was the reason.
I heard someone report Thiel talking about something similar to this, but I could have misunderstood. Either way, listening to him speak; he definitely is cuckoo bananas.