OpenAI rewrites its principles

OpenAI replaced its 2018 charter-style framework on April 26 with a new five-principle document written by Chief Executive Sam Altman. (openai.com) The new principles are democratization, empowerment, universal prosperity, resilience and adaptability. OpenAI says its mission is still to ensure artificial general intelligence benefits humanity, but the new document is framed around how AI is deployed now. (openai.com) The 2018 charter defined artificial general intelligence as systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work. It also said OpenAI would “stop competing with and start assisting” a rival if a safety-conscious project was close to building AGI first. (openai.com) That specific non-compete pledge is gone from the April 2026 rewrite. Business Insider said the shift marks a sharp break from the older charter’s emphasis on cooperation with rival labs. (businessinsider.com) (openai.com) The new text spends more space on access, products and infrastructure than on a single end-state called AGI. Altman wrote that OpenAI wants to put “truly general AI” in as many hands as possible while resisting power being concentrated in a few companies. (openai.com) Under “empowerment,” OpenAI says users should be able to accomplish increasingly valuable tasks with its services and should get broad autonomy. In the same section, it says the company will minimize catastrophic harm, local harms and “corrosive societal effects,” and will relax constraints only with more evidence. (openai.com) Under “universal prosperity,” Altman says governments may need new economic models so more people can share in AI-driven value creation. He also says OpenAI needs “huge amounts of AI infrastructure” and lower computing costs to spread those gains widely. (openai.com) The rewrite arrives as OpenAI is presenting itself more explicitly as a builder of large-scale AI services. On April 27, the company also announced “the next phase” of its Microsoft partnership, and its news page lists recent product releases including GPT-5.5 and new workplace agents in ChatGPT. (openai.com 1) (openai.com 2) OpenAI’s corporate structure has also changed since the charter era. Its current “About” page says the nonprofit OpenAI Foundation governs the for-profit OpenAI Group, which operates as a public benefit corporation. (openai.com) The last principle, “adaptability,” says OpenAI is now “a much larger force in the world” than it was a few years ago and promises transparency when its operating principles change. The new document keeps the old mission line, but it rewrites the rules around how OpenAI says it will pursue it. (openai.com)