Five people and a dog are seen in outline in orange, against an orange background. Two of the people talk to each other, one stands along with her stick, one walks a dog, and the other is in a wheelchair. All of them look at their mobile phones intently, and all cast shadows on the ground. The shadows are made up of network diagrams, being representative rather than a literal shadow.

One of the main problems of generative AI being deployed via a chatbot user interface is that it feels private. It feels like a direct message conversation. Of course, on the other side of the conversation is a black box controlled by Big Tech. You have to use these things carefully. As Mike Caulfield points out AI is not your friend.

This week, the day after OpenAI announced that it was backtracking on becoming a fully for-profit organisation, they announced ‘OpenAI for Countries’. This intitiative, it seems, is an attempt to still build the ‘moat’ required for economic dominance and control of the ecosystem — but using the backing of state infrastructure rather than venture capital funding.

Colour me sceptical, but the press release suggests that the Trump administration hasn’t happened and that the US is still some kind of force for democratic development. Instead, I’d argue, the “authoritarian versions of AI” used “to consolidate power” are exactly what is represented by a level of AI colonialism that only something like a collaboration between OpenAI and the US government could achieve.

Our Stargate project, an unprecedented investment in America’s AI infrastructure announced in January with President Trump and our partners Oracle and SoftBank, is now underway with our first supercomputing campus in Abilene, Texas, and more sites to come.

We’ve heard from many countries asking for help in building out similar AI infrastructure—that they want their own Stargates and similar projects. It’s clear to everyone now that this kind of infrastructure is going to be the backbone of future economic growth and national development. Technological innovation has always driven growth by helping people do more than they otherwise could—AI will scale human ingenuity itself and drive more prosperity by scaling our freedoms to learn, think, create and produce all at once.

We want to help these countries, and in the process, spread democratic AI, which means the development, use and deployment of AI that protects and incorporates long-standing democratic principles. Examples of this include the freedom for people to choose how they work with and direct AI, the prevention of government use of AI to amass control, and a free market that ensures free competition. All these things contribute to broad distribution of the benefits of AI, discourage the concentration of power, and help advance our mission. Likewise, we believe that partnering closely with the US government is the best way to advance democratic AI.

Today, we’re introducing OpenAI for Countries, a new initiative within the Stargate project. This is a moment when we need to act to support countries around the world that would prefer to build on democratic AI rails, and provide a clear alternative to authoritarian versions of AI that would deploy it to consolidate power.

Source: OpenAI

Image: Jamillah Knowles & Reset.Tech Australia