In DC, the OpenAI CEO Must Tell Three Stories at Once
Sam Altman arrives in Washington with terrible publicity, a state lawsuit against him personally, increasingly hostile lawmakers, and the need to show Wall Street that none of it matters.
A.I. Disclosure: I use LLM technology to help with research, fact-checking, document summaries, editing, and rewrites. I’m trying to use it responsibly, but I’m learning as I go. You can read my full ethics disclosure here.
According to an NBC News poll conducted this past March, AI is less popular with American voters than ICE. More specifically: only 26% of Americans hold favorable views of artificial intelligence, against 46% unfavorable — a net negative of twenty points. The agency that rolls up in the night to pull families apart rates better than the technology writing their children’s homework.
That’s the political backdrop for Sam Altman’s trip to Washington, DC. this week. He arrived in the capital Wednesday to meet with White House officials, and with House Speaker Mike Johnson and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries — the broadest possible spread of political power, a deliberately bipartisan tour. He came with a message about safety, national security, and America’s need to lead on AI. And he came, in effect, to speak to the president, Congress, and — listening through the walls for any sound that might move a stock — the investors who will soon fund OpenAI’s IPO. Those three audiences do not want the same things from him. In some ways, they want directly opposing things. What he says to satisfy one of them becomes a liability for the other two. Here’s who he has to win over this week.
Trump
Eleven days before Altman’s Washington visit, OpenAI filed a confidential IPO registration statement with the SEC — Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley leading the process, a September listing targeted, a valuation above $1 trillion sought. The filing, first reported by the Wall Street Journal and confirmed by CNBC and the New York Times, landed just as a jury in Oakland dismissed Elon Musk’s lawsuit against the company, clearing the last major legal obstacle to going public. Now, two weeks later, Altman has come to Washington to endorse an executive order his company has spent weeks helping to shape, and to curry favor with the White House.
The order, signed by President Trump on Tuesday, establishes a voluntary framework under which AI companies would submit their most advanced models for up to 30 days of government review before public release. Altman posted six words on X: “The new EO gets the balance right.” This is the public face of a relationship Altman has been carefully constructing since before Trump’s inauguration — he attended the ceremony, donated $1 million to the inaugural fund, and committed OpenAI to the $500 billion Stargate AI infrastructure project, which broke ground on its first major campus in Saline Township, Michigan on June 1st, with Altman and Oracle’s Larry Ellison on stage together.
OpenAI seems to have had a hand in softening this EO. An earlier draft called for a 90-day review period for frontier models. The final version requires 30. Newsweek reported that “tech companies were said to have convinced the president to hold off on his previous plan,” though no outlet has specifically named OpenAI as the force that drove the reduction. What is confirmed, per Yahoo News, is that Altman and other OpenAI staff “spent several weeks in dialogue with officials as the policy took shape” and that OpenAI was among the companies working directly with the White House on the order’s language. In the end, Altman got a watered-down version of an already pretty thin piece of regulation: only 30 days’ notice, a voluntary compliance framework, and no third-party or federal testing requirements. Altman is presumably at the White House to shake hands and clap for all of that.
What he may also be there to push along is the deterioration of Trump’s relationship with Anthropic, OpenAI’s closest rival and once the favored provider of AI technology to the Pentagon. In late February, after Anthropic tried to insert into a Pentagon contract explicit prohibitions on mass surveillance and autonomous weapons, Trump directed federal agencies to stop using its tools and designated the company a supply-chain risk — a label typically reserved for foreign adversaries. Anthropic’s $200 million DoD contract evaporated in an afternoon. OpenAI signed its own, new Pentagon deal hours later. As we’ll discuss in a moment, OpenAI needs that military contract, and many more besides, and the White House is how he can best try to keep that faucet open. Because whatever Altman’s relationship with this administration looks like from the outside, he is still subject to the caprice and favoritism of the president, and he’s still just a vendor whose contract can be pulled.
Congress
Altman once had senators more or less eating out of his hand. In the spring of 2023, the night before his first Senate testimony on AI, Sam Altman arranged a large private dinner and ChatGPT demonstration for members of Congress. Even representative Ted Lieu of California, a Democrat who holds a computer science degree from Stanford and sits on the House AI caucus, came out describing the experience as genuinely shocking — something close to magic. The guests were clearly awed. The impression OpenAI’s CEO left on them was brilliantly constructed and highly effective: we need to understand this thing before we can govern it, and this wonder kid Altman explains it best.
That version of Washington does not exist anymore.
