Elon Emails

Altman: board plan for 'YC AI' Delaware nonprofit

From:
Sam Altman
Date:
November 20, 2015 (Sent 10:48 AM)
To:
Elon Musk (cc: YC general counsel, name redacted)
Subject:
Re: AI docs
Elon– Plan is to have you, me, and Ilya on the Board of Directors for YC AI, which will be a Delaware non-profit. We will also state that we plan to elect two other outsiders by majority vote of the Board. We will write into the bylaws that any technology that potentially compromises the safety of humanity has to get consent of the Board to be released, and we will reference this in the researchers' employment contracts. At a high level, does that work for you? I'm cc'ing our GC <redacted> here–is there someone in your office he can work with on the details? Sam

About this email

Altman proposes that he, Musk and Sutskever sit on the board of 'YC AI', a Delaware nonprofit, with bylaws requiring board consent to release technology that could compromise humanity's safety.

Notes

Published by OpenAI (Altman's side) in its December 2024 blog post; LessWrong marks it as sourced from the OpenAI blog.

Where it came from

Published by recipient; attribution confirmed.

OpenAI, executive & internal. Tags: governance, board, nonprofit, y-combinator, safety