One Tuesday night, as my wife and I sat down for dinner, a sheriff’s deputy knocked on the door to serve me a subpoena…

One Tuesday night, as my wife and I sat down for dinner, a sheriff’s deputy knocked on the door to serve me a subpoena from OpenAI. I held back on talking about it because I didn't want to distract from SB 53, but Newsom just signed the bill so... here's what happened: 🧵

You might recall a story in the SF Standard that talked about OpenAI retaliating against critics. Among other things, OpenAI asked for all my private communications on SB 53 - a bill that creates new transparency rules and whistleblower protections at large AI companies. 2/15

Emily Dreyfuss@EmilyDreyfuss · Sep 2, 2025

Inside OpenAI, there's a growing paranoia that some of its loudest critics are being funded by Elon Musk and other billionaire competitors. Now, they are going after these nonprofit groups, but their evidence of a vast conspiracy is often extremely thin sfstandard.com/2025/09/02/ope…

Why did OpenAI subpoena me? Encode has criticized OpenAI’s restructuring and worked on AI regulations, including SB 53. I believe OpenAI used the pretext of their lawsuit against Elon Musk to intimidate their critics and imply that Elon is behind all of them. 3/15

The Midas Project@TheMidasProj · Aug 4, 2025

🚨 Breaking: A group of 100+ Nobel laureates, professors, whistleblowers, public figures, artists, and nonprofit organizations just released a letter asking OpenAI to tell the truth about its restructuring. Here’s what they had to say: 🧵

There’s a big problem with that idea: Elon isn’t involved with Encode. Elon wasn’t behind SB 53. He doesn’t fund us, and we’ve never spoken to him. 4/15

OpenAI went beyond just subpoenaing Encode about Elon. OpenAI could (and did!) send a subpoena to Encode’s corporate address asking about our funders or communications with Elon (which don’t exist). If OpenAI had stopped there, maybe you could argue it was in good faith. 5/15

But they didn’t stop there. They also sent a sheriff’s deputy to my home and asked for me to turn over private texts and emails with CA legislators, college students, and former OAI employees. 6/15

This is not normal. OpenAI used an unrelated lawsuit to intimidate advocates of a bill trying to regulate them. While the bill was still being debated. 7/15

OpenAI had no legal right to ask for this information. So we submitted an objection explaining why we would not be providing our private communications. (They never replied.) 8/15

A magistrate judge even chastised OpenAI more broadly for their behavior in the discovery process in their case against Musk. 9/15

This wasn’t the only way OpenAI behaved poorly on SB 53 before it was signed. They also sent Governor Newsom a letter trying to gut the bill by waiving all the requirements for any company that does any evaluation work with the federal government. 10/15

There is more I could go into about the nature of OAI's engagement on SB 53, but suffice to say that when I saw OpenAI’s so-called “master of the political dark arts” Chris Lehane claim that they "worked to improve the bill," I literally laughed out loud. 11/15

Prior to OpenAI, Chris Lehane’s PR clients included Boeing, the Weinstein Company, and Goldman Sachs. One person who worked on a campaign with Lehane said to the New Yorker “The goal was intimidation, to let everyone know that if they fuck with us they’ll regret it” 12/15

I have complicated feelings about OpenAI - I use and get value from their products, and they conduct and publish AI safety research that is worthy of genuine praise. I also know many OpenAI employees care a lot about OpenAI being a force for good in the world. 13/15

Sam Altman@sama · Sep 18, 2025

AI scheming is a particularly important risk we've been studying. More here: openai.com/index/detectin…

I want to see that side of OAI, but instead I see them trying to intimidate critics into silence. This episode was the most stressful period of my professional life. Encode has 3 FTEs - going against the highest-valued private company in the world is terrifying. 14/15

Does anyone believe these actions are consistent with OpenAI’s nonprofit mission to ensure that AGI benefits humanity? OpenAI still has time to do better. I hope they do. 15/15

As you might have seen, OAI put out a response to this thread. More info on that here:

Nathan Calvin@_NathanCalvin · Oct 11, 2025

I thought about writing a response to this post myself, but others have already been pointing out issues well enough. If you are trying to make up your mind about whether what happened was normal or OK (including if you are someone at OAI), I encourage you to read this thread and decide for yourself. 🧵