OpenAI reportedly weighed China and Russia funding, plus a Kanye West GPT-3 preview

Before it became the most talked-about AI company on the planet, OpenAI was reportedly entertaining some very unusual business ideas. According to a new account of the company’s early years, leaders floated selling future AI tools to governments that included China and Russia.

There was also a plan to give Kanye West early access to an unreleased model. Top staffers were reportedly horrified, and the reasons they gave still echo through the AI industry today.

The story, reported by Kevin Roose in The Atlantic, matters because it helps explain one of the biggest splits in tech. Some of the people who pushed back hardest on these ideas later walked out and founded Anthropic, now one of OpenAI’s fiercest rivals.

The “countries plan” and the Kanye pitch

The central episode dates to 2017. OpenAI co-founders Greg Brockman and Ilya Sutskever reportedly put forward an internal proposal known as the “countries plan.”

The idea was to fund the race toward artificial general intelligence, or AGI, by bringing nation-states into the picture. Under the proposal, OpenAI could have auctioned off future AGI rights or taken money from governments. The countries mentioned included the US, China, and Russia.

Dario Amodei, then a senior researcher at OpenAI, reportedly objected strongly. In September 2017, he laid out his concerns and called the plan “morally illegitimate.”

His reasoning, according to the report, was twofold. He argued the plan could intensify arms races between rival powers and could help enable human rights abuses.

The second episode came in 2020. Sam Altman reportedly offered Kanye West early access to a version of GPT-3, the language model that would later become a foundation for OpenAI’s commercial products. OpenAI’s policy director reportedly shut it down, pointing to West’s unpredictable behavior.

OpenAI has pushed back on parts of the story. The company disputes the characterization of the countries plan, saying it only considered an international cooperative model and never intended to sell AGI to China or Russia.

How internal fights became a rival company

Amodei was not a peripheral figure at OpenAI. He played a key role in developing GPT-2 and GPT-3, the models that turned the company from a research curiosity into a serious commercial player.

According to the report, the countries plan and the Kanye episode were part of a wider pattern of friction. Disagreements over governance, the push toward commercialization, and trust in leadership all reportedly piled up during OpenAI’s shift toward a hybrid commercial model.

OpenAI started as a nonprofit focused on building safe AI for broad benefit, then moved toward a structure that could raise large sums and sell products. Amodei and several colleagues eventually left. In 2021 they founded Anthropic, pitching it as a lab that would put safety first.

What this means for the AI race

The rivalry between OpenAI and Anthropic reportedly began as a disagreement over values: who should fund powerful AI, who should get access to it, and what guardrails belong around both. Both labs now compete for enterprise customers, government contracts, and top research talent. Their origin story shapes how each one sells itself, with Anthropic leaning heavily on a safety-first identity that this account helps explain.

OpenAI’s denial will be central to how this plays out. If the company’s version holds, the countries plan looks like an early brainstorm about international cooperation that never went anywhere. If critics’ version gains traction, it raises harder questions about judgment at the top of a company that now wields enormous influence.

The Kanye episode shows how informal access decisions could be at a company handling powerful technology, and how much depended on individual staff willing to say no.