Early hires, who were lured there by the mission?
Donors?
People who were supposed to be served by the non-profit (everyone)?
Some government regulator?
In a normal situation, the primary people with standing to prevent such a move would be the board members of the non-profit, which makes sense. Luckily for Sam, the employees helped kick out all the dissenters a long time ago.
Would the founding documents actually count as proof of a lie? I feel like the defense could easily make the argument that the documents accurately represented their intent at the time, but as time went on they found that it made more sense to change.
It seems like, if the founding documents were to be proof of a lie, you'd have to have corresponding proof that the documents were intentionally written to mislead people.
You’re right that Altman is/will sell it as an unexpected but necessary adaptation to external circumstances, but that’s a hard sell. Potentially not to a court, sadly, but definitely in the public eye. For example:
We are concerned about late-stage AGI development becoming a competitive race without time for adequate safety precautions… We are committed to providing public goods that help society navigate the path to AGI.
And this is the very first paragraph of their founding blog post, from 2015:
OpenAI is a non-profit artificial intelligence research company. Our goal is to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return. Since our research is free from financial obligations, we can better focus on a positive human impact.
Whether the case is any good is another matter.
Try to contribute to the conversation, though.
What you say is also untrue, there's a minimum set of requirements that have to be met regarding discovery, etc.