Why OpenAI Tried To Start A Global Arms Race (And Why You Cannot Trust Tech Bros)

By Vicky Sidler | Published 16 May 2026 at 12:00 GMT+2

If you have ever found yourself lying awake at night, desperately hoping that the billionaires building the future of Artificial Intelligence are stable, ethical human beings who have our best interests at heart, I am so sorry to ruin your day. They are acting like literal comic-book villains.

According to a sweeping, deeply unhinged new investigation by The New Yorker, the senior leadership at OpenAI once hatched a geopolitical scheme to enrich their company by actively pitting hostile world governments against each other. It is an astonishing pattern of manipulation, deceit, and raw sociopathy from CEO Sam Altman and his executive team. They didn't just want to build a cool chatbot; they wanted to leverage the threat of global destruction to trigger a multi-billion-dollar bidding war.

As a StoryBrand Certified Guide, I spend my life telling business owners to build their marketing on a foundation of authentic, undeniable trust. But if you are currently outsourcing your entire brand voice and business operations to a tech monopoly run by people who casually muse about selling superweapons to dictators, you are building your house on a terrifyingly unstable fault line.

Let’s rip apart this catastrophic "countries plan," explore why Sam Altman is actively lying to US intelligence agencies, and discuss how you can immunize your business against this level of corporate psychopathy.

TL;DR:

• The New Yorker exposed that OpenAI leadership proposed a terrifying "countries plan" to trigger a global bidding war for AI technology by pitting world powers like China and Russia against each other.

• Greg Brockman, OpenAI's second-in-command, allegedly justified the reckless geopolitical scheme by arguing, "It worked for nuclear weapons, why not AI?"

• CEO Sam Altman actively lied to US Intelligence officials, fabricating a story about a Chinese "AGI Manhattan Project" just to secure billions in government funding.

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Table of Contents:

Why Did OpenAI Try To Start A Literal Global Arms Race?

Because when you are sitting in a Silicon Valley boardroom, the threat of mutually assured destruction apparently just sounds like a really solid monetization strategy.

Back in 2017, OpenAI’s second-in-command, Greg Brockman, was allegedly unimpressed by his ethics adviser’s boring suggestion to form an international body to cooperate on AI safety. Instead, Brockman hatched what internally became known as the "countries plan." He openly mused about playing massive world powers against each other to trigger a geopolitical bidding war. His actual, verbatim logic, according to the ethics adviser, was: "It worked for nuclear weapons, why not AI?"

Let that sink in. They looked at the Cold War—a decades-long era of paralyzing global terror that brought humanity to the absolute brink of nuclear annihilation—and thought, "Hey, we could totally use that to boost our Q3 revenue!" The exasperated ethics adviser pointed out the sheer insanity of taking the most destructive technology ever invented and casually saying, "What if we sold it to Putin?" But to the executives at OpenAI, this wasn't a moral crisis; it was just a spicy business model.

What Happens When Your Boardroom Turns Into A Bond Villain Lair?

Because when the people building our future stop worrying about safety and start treating global security like a giant game of Monopoly, the employees naturally start to panic.

OpenAI’s former policy director, Jack Clark, accurately described this unhinged scheme as a "prisoner’s dilemma," where the company would essentially extort nations by implicitly threatening that not giving OpenAI funding would be dangerous. It was essentially corporate blackmail on a planetary scale. A junior researcher recalled sitting in the meeting where this was discussed and thinking it was "completely f*cking insane."

And here is the most depressing part: they eventually dropped the plan a few months later, but not because they suddenly grew a conscience or realized it might trigger World War III. They only dropped it because employees threatened to quit. The ethics adviser brutally noted that the threat of losing software engineers "was always something that had more weight in Sam’s calculations" than the threat of causing a war between great powers.

Did Sam Altman Actually Lie To The United States Government?

Because if you can't get Putin to fund your startup, your next logical step is apparently to just aggressively lie to the CIA.

Starting in 2017, Sam Altman repeatedly went to US intelligence officials and breathlessly claimed that China had launched an "AGI Manhattan Project" to build artificial general intelligence. He argued that to stay on equal footing, the US government urgently needed to give OpenAI billions of dollars. But when the intelligence officials actually did their jobs and pressed him for a source on this terrifying Chinese super-weapon, Altman just vaguely waved his hands and replied, "I've heard things."

An official who looked into the claims concluded that Altman had completely made the entire thing up. It was just a sales pitch. He was casting himself as a modern-day J. Robert Oppenheimer, but instead of actually building the atomic bomb to stop the Nazis, Altman was just leveraging fake geopolitical terror to line his own pockets. He was willing to manipulate global superpowers purely to maintain his own massive ego and secure an endless stream of venture capital.

How Do You Protect Your Brand From Sociopathic Tech Empires?

Because if you are currently trusting these people with your proprietary data, your marketing strategy, and your customer interactions, you need to wake up immediately.

These are not benevolent innovators trying to save humanity. They are ruthless corporate monopolists who are openly willing to destabilize the planet to secure funding. And yet, millions of businesses are eagerly feeding their most sensitive information into OpenAI's servers, trusting them to act as the foundational bedrock of their future operations. It is a catastrophic strategic error. You cannot outsource your core brand integrity to a company that lacks a basic moral compass.

You have to actively insulate your business from this chaos. You need a structural foundation that relies on human empathy, not algorithmic extortion. Get my 5-Minute Marketing Fix. It acts as a rapid diagnostic tool to help you use your actual, highly-evolved human brain to craft a crystal-clear StoryBrand One-Liner. It gives you a standardized, reliable system to earn authentic trust, proving to your customers that you are a stable, ethical human Guide—not just another casualty of the next Silicon Valley arms race.

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FAQs:

1. What was OpenAI's "countries plan"?

According to The New Yorker, the "countries plan" was a terrifying 2017 geopolitical scheme hatched by OpenAI leadership to trigger a global bidding war for AI technology by pitting world powers, like Russia and China, against each other.

2. Who is Greg Brockman and what did he say about nuclear weapons?

Greg Brockman is the second-in-command at OpenAI. When warned about the dangers of an AI arms race, he allegedly defended the "countries plan" to extort governments by arguing, "It worked for nuclear weapons, why not AI?"

3. Did Sam Altman lie to US intelligence agencies?

Yes. According to the investigation, CEO Sam Altman repeatedly told US intelligence officials that China had launched an "AGI Manhattan Project" to secure billions in funding. An official who investigated the claim concluded Altman completely fabricated the story as a sales pitch.

4. Why did OpenAI eventually drop the "countries plan"?

They did not drop the plan due to ethical concerns or the terrifying risk of causing a war between great powers. They only abandoned the scheme because several horrified employees threatened to quit, and retaining engineers was more important to Sam Altman's calculations.

5. Why should businesses care about OpenAI's executive behavior?

If you are building your marketing strategy and business operations around ChatGPT, you are trusting your brand's future to a company that lacks basic ethical boundaries. To survive, you must rely on undeniably human frameworks, like StoryBrand, rather than sociopathic tech monopolies.