AI safety groups aren't buying OpenAI's spending retreat - Politico

Sam Altman has discovered the political equivalent of a yoga retreat: a 'shifting stance' on midterm spending that involves no movement whatsoever. Politico reports that AI safety groups are not buying it, which makes them the only people in Washington still reading the brochure. And leading the charge to remain unconvinced is a super PAC called Leading the Future, which has spent $8 million to end the House campaign of New York assemblymember Alex Bores. A group named after the future spending eight figures to guarantee one particular Democrat doesn't have one — you have to admire the commitment to irony, if nothing else.

Bores, to his credit, has produced the season's most sensible sentence: he won't believe the strategy is changing 'unless and until they do.' What a devastatingly low bar, and what a revealing one — the standard for believing a tech CEO has changed course is now the standard we apply to a toddler promising to share. The safety groups want 'stronger commitments' to downsize the flood of money. Commitments. Not caps, not law, not a single dollar clawed back — a promise, from an industry whose foundational product is the confident generation of things that aren't true.

Meanwhile the retreat itself has the substance of a press release with a mood board. Nothing has been signed. No number has gone down. The only documented expenditure in the story remains the $8 million that went out the door to flatten a state assemblymember's congressional ambitions, and there is no line item anywhere suggesting any of it is coming back. If OpenAI-aligned money wanted to prove it had downsized, the mechanism is available and remarkably simple: don't write the cheque. Until then, 'shifting stance' is just how you describe a man backing slowly toward the exit while insisting he's still dancing.