Nathan Calvin, the 29-year-old general counsel of Encode—a small AI policy nonprofit with just three full-time employees—published a viral thread on X Friday accusing OpenAI of using intimidation tactics to undermine California’s SB 53, the California Transparency in Frontier Artificial Intelligence Act, while it was still being debated. He also alleged that OpenAI used its ongoing legal battle with Elon Musk as a pretext to target and intimidate critics, including Encode, which it implied was secretly funded by Musk.
Calvin’s thread quickly drew widespread attention, including from inside OpenAI itself. Joshua Achiam, the company’s head of mission alignment, weighed in on X with his own thread, written in a personal capacity, starting by saying, “At what is possibly a risk to my whole career I will say: this doesn’t seem great.”
