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OpenAI has deleted the word 'safely' from its mission

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Re: OpenAI has deleted the word 'safely' from its mission

#101

Post by overgard »

fghorow wrote: post #18

Yes. ChatGPT "safely" helped[1] my friend's daughter write a suicide note. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/18/opinion/chat-gpt-mental-h...

I have mixed feelings on this (besides obviously being sad about the loss of a good person). I think one of the useful things about AI chat is that you can talk about things that are difficult to talk to another human about, whether it's an embarrassing question or just things you don't want people to know about you. So it strikes me that trying to add a guard rail for all the things that reflect poorly on a chat agent seems like it'd reduce the utility of it. I think people have trouble talking about suicidal thoughts to real therapists because AFAIK therapists have a duty to report self harm, which makes people less likely to talk about it. One thing that I think is dangerous with the current LLM models though is the sycophancy problem. Like, all the time chatGPT is like "Great question!". Honestly, most my questions are not "great", nor are my insights "sharp", but flattery will get you a lot of places.. I just worry that these things attempting to be agreeable lets people walk down paths where a human would be like "ok, no"

Re: OpenAI has deleted the word 'safely' from its mission

#102

Post by varenc »

simonw wrote: post #37

You can see the official mission statements in the IRS 990 filings for each year on https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/810... I turned them into a Gist with fake author dates so you can see the diffs here: https://gist.github.com/simonw/e36f0e5ef4a86881d145083f759bc... Wrote this up on my blog too: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/13/openai-mission-stateme...

Thank you for actually extracting the historical mission statement changes! Also I love that you/Claude were able to back-date the gist to just use the change logs to represent time.

re: the article, it's worth noting OAI's 2021 statement just included '...that benefits humanity', and in 2022 'safely' was first added so it became '...that safely benefits humanity'. And then the most recent statement was entirely re-written to be much shorter, and no longer includes the word 'safely'.

Other words also removed from the statement:

   responsibly
   unconstrained
   safe
   positive
   ensuring
   technology
   world
   profound, etc, etc

Re: OpenAI has deleted the word 'safely' from its mission

#103

Post by simonw »

pouwerkerk wrote: post #54
simonw wrote: post #37

You can see the official mission statements in the IRS 990 filings for each year on https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/810... I turned them into a Gist with fake author dates so you can see the diffs here: https://gist.github.com/simonw/e36f0e5ef4a86881d145083f759bc... Wrote this up on my blog too: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/13/openai-mission-stateme...

This is fascinating. Does something like this exist for Anthropic? I'm suddenly very curious about consistency/adaptation in AI lab missions.

They're a Public Benefit Corporation but not a non-profit, which means they don't have to file those kinds of documents publicly like 501(c)(3)s do.

I asked Claude and it ran a search and dug up a copy of their certificate of incorporation in a random Google Drive: https://drive.google.com/file/d/17szwAHptolxaQcmrSZL_uuYn5p-...

It says "The specific public benefit that the Corporation will promote is to responsibly develop and maintain advanced AI for the long term benefit of humanity."

There are other versions in https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1ImqXYv9_H2FTNAujZfu3... - as far as I can tell they all have exactly the same text for that bit with the exception of the first one from 2021 which says:

"The specific public benefit that the Corporation will promote is to responsibly develop and maintain advanced Al for the cultural, social and technological improvement of humanity."

Re: OpenAI has deleted the word 'safely' from its mission

#105

Post by fragmede »

Bnjoroge wrote: post #83

Did anyone actually think their sole purpose as an org is anything but make money? Even anthropic isnt any different, and I am very skeptical even of orgs such as A12

Yes, because there are many ways to make money and the chose this one instead of anything else.

Re: OpenAI has deleted the word 'safely' from its mission

#106

Post by tsunamifury »

rdtsc wrote: post #43

> But the ChatGPT maker seems to no longer have the same emphasis on doing so “safely.” A step in the positive direction, at least they don't have to pretend any longer. It's like Google and "don't be evil". People didn't get upset with Google because they were more evil than others, heck, there's Oracle, defense contractors and the prison industrial system. People were upset with them because they were hypocrites. T…

I worked at Google for 10 years in AI and invented suggestive language from wordnet/bag of words.

As much as what you are saying sounds right I was there when sundar made the call to bury proto LLM tech because he felt the world would be damaged for it.

And I don’t even like the guy.

Re: OpenAI has deleted the word 'safely' from its mission

#108

Post by sonofhans »

observationist wrote: post #97
LeoPanthera wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We probably shouldn't be using the "archive" site that hijacks your browser into DDOSing other people. I'm actually surprised HN hasn't banned it.

Some of us have, and some of us still use it. The functionality and the need for an archive not subject to the same constraints as the wayback machine and other institutions outweighs the blackhat hijinks and bickering between a blogger and the archive.is person/team. My own ethical calculus is that they shouldn't be ddos attacking, but on the other hand, it's the internet equivalent of a house egging, and not that b…

My guess is that you’ve not had your house egged, or have some poverty of imagination about it. I grew up in the midwest where this did happen. A house egging would take hours to clean up, and likely cause permanent damage to paint and finishes.

Or perhaps you think it’s no big deal to damage someone else’s property, as long as you only do it a little.

Re: OpenAI has deleted the word 'safely' from its mission

#109

Post by zahlman »

LeoPanthera wrote: post #35
lbeckman314 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://archive.is/fuJCe (Apologies if this archive link isn't helpful, the unlocked_article_code in the URL still resulted in a paywall on my side...)

We probably shouldn't be using the "archive" site that hijacks your browser into DDOSing other people. I'm actually surprised HN hasn't banned it.

I can't find the claimed JS in the page source as of now, and also it displays just fine with JS disabled.
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