A book excerpt details the Sam Altman-Dario Amodei feud, and Greg Brockman and Ilya Sutskever's 2017 plan to auction rights to OpenAI's future AGI to countries
The AtlanticKevin Roose
Context & Ripple Effects
The excerpt adds an institutional-control dimension to a conflict that March 2026 reporting had already cast as a decadelong Altman-Amodei dispute. It also lands after Altman publicly characterized OpenAI as having built, or nearly built, AGI before qualifying the statement as nonliteral in a February 2026 profile.
The 2017 proposal matters because it makes allocation of any future AGI—rather than technical capability alone—a central governance question for OpenAI and the countries seeking access.
First-order effects
OpenAI gains a durable reputational reference point: claims about stewardship of future AGI will be measured against the disclosed 2017 idea of auctioning country-specific rights.
The Altman-Amodei feud is recast as a disagreement with consequences for AGI governance and access, not solely a personal or organizational rupture.
Second-order effects
Governments seeking frontier-model access face a sharper commercial-versus-governance question: whether access should be allocated through bilateral rights, safety constraints, or another public-interest framework.
OpenAI's confirmed allocation of 5%–10% of compute capacity to safety work becomes more salient as evidence it must distinguish its present governance posture from the historical proposal.
Third-order effects
If frontier systems approach AGI-level capability, deciding which states receive access is likely to become a core corporate-governance issue alongside model safety and deployment controls.
The episode points toward frontier labs being evaluated not only as technology suppliers, but as institutions whose access policies can carry geopolitical consequences.
The trend: Frontier AI governance is shifting from debates over model capability toward contests over who sets, sells, and safeguards access to the most powerful systems.
these are the people leading the most transformational technology in the world since the splitting of the atom. can't stress this enough how much i want open source model or somebody more ethical like @demishassabis to beat them to the punch. fyi, all about pacing the frontier is…
Kanye is such a genius. He led to the creation of Anthropic, the rise in AI safety and interpretability work, and possibly aligned superintelligence. What did he see?
Dario Amodei and Sam Altman didn't always despise one another. @kevinroose goes inside the biggest and most consequential rivalry in Silicon Valley: https://www.theatlantic.com/ ...