OpenAI hopes to expand its shift into providing government services and is briefing government on preparing their entire economies for the impact of AI. It is also repositioning its services as “democratic AI” which it wants to make available to governments around the world, rather than them running “autocratic AI” systems, said staff at a briefing on the sidelines of the Paris AI Safety Summit yesterday.
OpenAI hopes to expand its shift into providing government services and is briefing government on preparing their entire economies for the impact of AI. It is also repositioning its services as “democratic AI” which it wants to make available to governments around the world, rather than them running “autocratic AI” systems, said staff at a briefing on the sidelines of the Paris AI Safety Summit yesterday.Leaders at the summit are understanding the scale and potential impact of AI, said Chris Lehane, OpenAI’s chief global affairs officer.
“This is a productivity driving technology, and as such, has a nation-building capacity, particularly for the economics of a country,” said Lehane.
Ronnie Chatterji, OpenAI’s chief economist, said his job was to understand the capabilities of the models and translate this to policy makers and businesses.
“Beyond infrastructure, you also have to prepare your economy by training the workforce,” the economist said.
At the national scale, the company launched ChatGPT Gov in the US at the end of January. The new platform aims to make it easier for US government agencies to adopt frontier AI.
“We have lots of opportunities to improve both the distribution of government services ... how people navigate public services and the efficiency of government,” Chatterji said.
Referring to US Vice President JD Vance’s address to the summit during which he told fellow dignitaries that foreign regulators were “tightening the screws” on US firms (see here), Lehane said to hear Vance “talk about this idea of productivity leading to prosperity, leading to freedom, I think sort of captures that concept in its essence.”
— Democratic AI —
Lehane said the team spends a lot of time thinking about “democratic AI versus autocratic AI.”
He said there are only two countries in the world that can build AI at scale: the US and “the CCP-led China.”
The competition is very real and the stakes are enormous, said the lobbyist, acknowledging the release of DeepSeek and accepting that while it’s not clear exactly how much it cost to train or where the data came from, “it's a very powerful model.”
“The rails of AI, the global rails of AI, will be built by one of those two countries,” said Lehane. “At the end of the day, this competition is really serious. Are those rails free, democratic AI, informed by democratic principles and democratic values? Or are they built on autocratic, authoritarian AI?”
Infrastructure underpins whether a country has “shared prosperity and democratic AI versus autocratic AI,” he said. “You're not going to be able to successfully make this available in a broad-based way, nor are you going to prevail on democratic AI unless you get the infrastructure piece right.”
China has enormous amounts of data available “because it's an authoritarian country,” as well as abundant energy, said Lehane. It will come down to raw computing power, which is why the US is going ahead with its $500 billion Stargate project to invest in AI infrastructure. Europe appears to be realizing the situation and following suit, noted the lobbyist, with its announcement yesterday of the 200 billion euro ($206 billion) InvestAI initiative (see here).
"If we do want to win on democratic AI," Lehane added, "the company that is the premier developer, builder, designer and leader of this technology is just going to be absolutely critical to succeeding in that competition."
It is not yet decided how OpenAI would decide on making its democratic government AI services available to other countries, but would involve making it easy for countries to be able to build on US, democratic rails and would likely start with close partners such as NATO members, according to an OpenAI spokesperson.
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