https://mlumiste.com/general/openai-charter/ Skip links * Skip to primary navigation * Skip to content * Skip to footer Martin Lumiste * About * Content * Trivia Toggle menu Based on its own charter, OpenAI should surrender the race March 8, 2026 3 minute read Back in 2018, OpenAI published a charter, which includes a self-sacrifice clause: We are concerned about late-stage AGI development becoming a competitive race without time for adequate safety precautions. Therefore, if a value-aligned, safety-conscious project comes close to building AGI before we do, we commit to stop competing with and start assisting this project. We will work out specifics in case-by-case agreements, but a typical triggering condition might be "a better-than-even chance of success in the next two years." Interestingly, this is still hosted at https://openai.com/charter/, meaning it remains the official company policy. At the same time, explicitly stated AGI timelines by Sam Altman are the following: Date Predicted Diff Quote / Claim Source AGI Year (years) May "Within the next ten years, OpenAI Blog -- 22, ~2033 ~10 AI systems will exceed Governance of 2023 expert skill level in most Superintelligence domains" "By the time the end of this Dec ~2030 ~6 decade rolls around, the TIME 2023 world will be in an unbelievably better place" Nov "I think in 5 years [...] 4, ~2029 ~5 people are like, man, the 20VC Podcast 2024 AGI moment came and went" Nov "What are you excited about 8, 2025 ~1 in 2025? - AGI" Futurism 2024 Jan "AGI will probably get 2025 ~2029 ~4 developed during Trump's Bloomberg term" "By 2030, if we don't have Sep extraordinarily capable 25, 2030 ~4 models that do things we TechSpot 2025 can't, I'd be very surprised" Oct "Automated AI research 28, 2028 ~2 intern by Sep 2026, full AI OfficeChai 2025 researcher by Mar 2028" Dec "AGI kinda went whooshing 18, 2025 0 by... okay fine, we built Windows Central 2025 AGIs" Feb "We basically have built 3, 2025 ~-1 AGI" (later: "a spiritual ALM Corp 2026 statement, not a literal one") We can see that the timeline of AGI (let's assume this is the timeline for a better-than-even chance) has accelerated and the median prediction since 2025 is around 2 years. Notably, in the latest interviews it's claimed that AGI has been achieved, and we're now racing towards ASI. Finally, here's a snapshot of the current overall Arena ranking of top 10 models. Model Overall Expert Hard Coding Math Creative Instruction Longer Prompts Writing Following Query claude-opus-4-6 1 1 2 2 3 4 2 2 claude-opus-4-6-thinking 2 2 1 1 2 1 1 1 gemini-3.1-pro-preview 3 3 3 3 1 5 3 3 grok-4.20-beta1 4 14 4 5 20 2 8 12 gemini-3-pro 5 7 5 9 5 3 9 5 gpt-5.4-high 6 4 10 11 8 6 5 11 gpt-5.2-chat-latest 7 10 7 6 4 9 10 15 gemini-3-flash 8 9 9 18 7 8 13 13 grok-4.1-thinking 9 17 13 19 21 19 28 27 claude-opus-4-5-202... 10 6 6 4 13 7 4 4 Based on these, the flagship GPT-5.4 model is clearly trailing behind competition. At least Anthropic's and Google's models are clearly safety-conscious, and probably value-aligned (whatever that means, but since the models are drop-in replacements to GPT, it should hold). It can be debated whether arena.ai is a suitable metric for AGI, a strong case can probably be made for why it's not. However, that's irrelevant, as the spirit of the self-sacrifice clause is to avoid an arms race, and we are clearly in one. Therefore, one can only conclude, that we currently meet the stated example triggering condition of "a better-than-even chance of success in the next two years". As per its charter, OpenAI should stop competing with the likes of Anthropic and Gemini, and join forces, however that might look like. --------------------------------------------------------------------- While this will never happen, I think it's illustrative of some great points for pondering: * The impotence of naive idealism in the face of economic incentives. * The discrepancy between marketing points and practical actions. * The changing goalposts of AGI and timelines. Notably, it's common to now talk about ASI instead, implying we may have already achieved AGI, almost without noticing. Categories: general Updated: March 8, 2026 Previous Next * * GitHub * Goodreads * Feed (c) 2026 Martin Lumiste. Powered by Jekyll & Minimal Mistakes.