The "safely" in all the AI company PR going around was really about brand safety. I guess they're confident enough in the models to not respond with anything embarrassing to the brand.
OpenAI has deleted the word 'safely' from its mission
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Re: OpenAI has deleted the word 'safely' from its mission
#52They should have done that after Suchir Balaji was murdered for protesting against industrial scale copyright infringement.
Re: OpenAI has deleted the word 'safely' from its mission
#53Yes. 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...
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Re: OpenAI has deleted the word 'safely' from its mission
#54You 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.
Re: OpenAI has deleted the word 'safely' from its mission
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is no longer about money, it's about power.
> This is no longer about money, it's about power This is more Altman-speak. Before it was about how AI was going to end the world. That started backfiring, so now we're talking about political power. That power, however, ultimately flows from the wealth AI generates. It's about the money. They're for-profit corporations.
Kind of? Assuming OpenAI was actually 2-3 years ahead of other LLM companies, it would be hard to put a value to that tech advantage
Re: OpenAI has deleted the word 'safely' from its mission
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
> This is no longer about money, it's about power This is more Altman-speak. Before it was about how AI was going to end the world. That started backfiring, so now we're talking about political power. That power, however, ultimately flows from the wealth AI generates. It's about the money. They're for-profit corporations.
Has AI generated any wealth?
There'd be a recession otherwise, no?
Re: OpenAI has deleted the word 'safely' from its mission
#57Earlier 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.
Oof TIL, thanks for the heads up that's a shame!
https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/417269/archive-toda...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment...
https://gyrovague.com/2026/02/01/archive-today-is-directing-...
Re: OpenAI has deleted the word 'safely' from its mission
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is no longer about money, it's about power.
> This is no longer about money, it's about power This is more Altman-speak. Before it was about how AI was going to end the world. That started backfiring, so now we're talking about political power. That power, however, ultimately flows from the wealth AI generates. It's about the money. They're for-profit corporations.
If AI achieves what these guys envision, money probably won't mean much.
What would they do with money? Pay people to work?
Re: OpenAI has deleted the word 'safely' from its mission
#59“To boldly go where no one has gone before.”
Re: OpenAI has deleted the word 'safely' from its mission
#60Yes. 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...
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