The Atlantic: OpenAI floated auctioning AGI rights to governments in 2017

According to an excerpt from Kevin Roose's book The AGI Chronicles, OpenAI co-founders Greg Brockman and Ilya Sutskever proposed in 2017 auctioning rights to the company's future AGI to governments, including the US, China and Russia, as a fundraising strategy. Dario Amodei objected, one of several disputes that led him to leave and found Anthropic. OpenAI said it did not consider selling AGI to China or Russia and dropped the plan after securing Microsoft funding.

• The 2017 plan proposed auctioning AGI rights to governments
• Internally it was called the "countries plan" and served as fundraising
• Amodei warned it would worsen arms races and hurt OpenAI's legitimacy
• OpenAI dropped the idea after Microsoft funding came in