Here is a question: what do you call it when a tech company considers starting a bidding war between the United States, China, and Russia for access to AI technology? OpenAI's own staffers had a word for it. "Completely f*cking insane."

The New Yorker's devastating new profile of Sam Altman keeps delivering. Among the most jaw-dropping revelations: in 2017, OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman proposed what became known internally as the "countries plan." The idea was breathtakingly simple and breathtakingly reckless: pit world governments against each other in a bidding war for OpenAI's technology.

According to the reporting, Brockman's ethics adviser had suggested forming an international body to cooperate on AI safety, similar to nuclear nonproliferation frameworks. Brockman rejected that. Instead, he mused about playing world powers like China and Russia against each other. His logic, according to Page Hedley, the ethics adviser: "It worked for nuclear weapons, why not AI?"

Let that sink in. The man building AI tools that hundreds of millions of people use every day once looked at the nuclear arms race and thought: good business model.

"What If We Sold It to Putin?"

Hedley told The New Yorker exactly how brazen the discussions were: "The premise, which they didn't dispute, was 'We're talking about potentially the most destructive technology ever invented. What if we sold it to Putin?'"

Jack Clark, OpenAI's policy director at the time, described the pitch as a "prisoner's dilemma, where all of the nations need to give us funding" and that "implicitly makes not giving us funding kind of dangerous."

Read that again. OpenAI's leadership was openly discussing a framework where governments would be coerced into funding them by the implicit threat that rival nations would get the technology first. This is not startup hustle. This is geopolitical extortion with extra steps.

The Fake China Threat

It gets worse. Beginning in 2017, Altman repeatedly told US intelligence officials that China had launched an "AGI Manhattan Project." His pitch was clear: OpenAI needed billions in government money to keep America competitive. When officials pressed for a source, Altman replied that he had "heard things."

One official who investigated the claims concluded that Altman had made it all up. "It was just being used as a sales pitch."

So the CEO of the world's most prominent AI company fabricated a national security threat to secure government funding. The New Yorker compared Altman to Oppenheimer, noting that while the physicist "used impassioned appeals about saving the world from the Nazis to persuade physicists to uproot their lives," Altman "leverages fears about the geopolitical stakes of his technology."

The Pattern Is the Point

The countries plan was eventually killed after employees threatened to quit. But the instinct it revealed did not go away. OpenAI went from a nonprofit committed to beneficial AI to a $852 billion company seeking IPO. The "countries plan" was dropped, but the underlying strategy of leveraging fear and urgency for funding became the company's entire growth model.

This is the company that wants to build superintelligence. This is the company that wants legal immunity when its AI kills people. This is the company whose CEO's home was just firebombed and shot at in the same weekend.

Maybe the countries plan was dropped. But the worldview behind it is still running the company. And it is about to go public.

First reported by The New Yorker. Additional reporting by Futurism.