OpenAI broadens its policy fight

OpenAI is widening its fight on two fronts at the same time. In letters sent on April 6, 2026, the company asked the attorneys general of California and Delaware to investigate Elon Musk and his associates for what it called “improper and anti-competitive behavior,” and it said Musk had been coordinating attacks with Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg as an April 27 trial approaches. That legal escalation is only half the story. On the same week, OpenAI published a new policy paper dated April 6, 2026, called “Industrial Policy for the Intelligence Age,” arguing that governments may need taxes on automated labor, broader public wealth-sharing tools, and stronger labor protections as artificial intelligence changes how income is earned. Put simply, OpenAI is no longer acting like a company that only wants to build models and defend itself in court. It is also trying to shape the political rules around who controls advanced artificial intelligence, who gets paid when software replaces human work, and which public institutions absorb the shock if that transition happens quickly. The letter to state officials comes out of a long personal and corporate split between Musk and OpenAI. Musk helped found OpenAI in 2015, left in 2018 after unsuccessfully pushing to merge it with Tesla, later launched rival company xAI, and then sued OpenAI in 2024 over its move away from its original nonprofit structure. OpenAI’s new allegation is that Musk’s campaign is not just a private lawsuit or a public feud. According to reporting reviewed by CNBC and Gizmodo, Jason Kwon, OpenAI’s chief strategy officer, told state attorneys general that Musk has tried to undermine OpenAI through repeated “attacks,” including by coordinating efforts with Zuckerberg, and that those efforts could interfere with OpenAI’s push toward artificial general intelligence, the industry term for systems that could match or exceed human performance across broad tasks. Meta’s role in the dispute appears tied less to a formal legal case than to OpenAI’s claim of coordinated pressure. Public reporting says OpenAI’s letter pointed to Zuckerberg and Meta as part of a broader effort to damage the company while it is defending its structure, leadership, and control over future artificial intelligence systems. The timing matters. Jury selection in the Musk case is scheduled to begin on April 27, 2026, in federal court in Northern California, so OpenAI’s appeal to state attorneys general looks like an attempt to move the fight out of the courtroom and into the regulatory arena just before the case reaches a more public stage. That is an inference from the sequence of events, but it fits the dates and the company’s own language. At the same time, OpenAI is trying to sound less like a defendant and more like a policy architect. Its April 2026 paper says the United States is moving toward “superintelligence,” warns that labor income and payroll taxes could shrink if machines do more of the work, and argues that governments should start redesigning tax and welfare systems before that shift becomes severe. That is where the “tax on automated labor” idea comes in. Reporting on the document says OpenAI floated levies tied to automation, higher taxes on some capital income, public wealth funds, and pilots for a four-day workweek, all aimed at a world where profits may rise even as fewer people collect wages from traditional jobs. This is a notable shift for a company that spent much of 2023 through 2025 arguing for safety rules, infrastructure investment, and American competitiveness. OpenAI’s January 13, 2025 “Economic Blueprint” focused heavily on growth, national security, and access, while the April 2026 paper moves further into questions that sound more like tax policy, labor policy, and redistribution. There is also a self-interested logic running through both moves. If OpenAI can persuade officials that rivals are trying to sabotage it and that artificial intelligence will require a new social contract, it strengthens the company’s case that it should be treated not just as another tech firm, but as a central institution in a national transition. That is an inference, but it is consistent with the company’s simultaneous legal, economic, and public-policy push. The tension is obvious. OpenAI is asking governments to trust it as a steward of systems that could reorganize work, while also asking those same governments to investigate one rival and implicitly scrutinize another. That combination turns a corporate feud into a broader fight over who gets to write the political and economic rules of the artificial intelligence era. (giz