OpenAI CEO Sam Altman published "Our Principles" on April 26, 2026, laying out five tenets meant to guide the company's work toward AGI: Democratization, Empowerment, Universal Prosperity, Resilience, and Adaptability. The post argues that AI could exceed the impact of electricity or steam engines, and that power should be "held in a decentralized way by people" rather than consolidated among a few companies. Altman writes that OpenAI's goal is "to put truly general AI in the hands of as many people as possible."
The principles read like a strategic roadmap as much as a philosophical statement. "Universal Prosperity" justifies OpenAI's massive infrastructure spending and datacenter buildout worldwide. "Resilience" acknowledges risks like biological threats and cybersecurity vulnerabilities, advocating for what Altman calls "iterative deployment." And "Adaptability" concedes that OpenAI may need to "trade off some empowerment for more resilience" as conditions change, a candid admission for a corporate blog post.
The reception on Hacker News was brutal. The top comment demanded "FOSS || GTFO," and others compared the post to an April Fools' joke published late. The skepticism isn't unfounded. OpenAI was founded in December 2015 as a non-profit committed to open-sourcing all its work. A $1 billion investment from Microsoft in 2019 triggered a shift to a capped-profit structure. By 2026, the company operates proprietary APIs and closed models while claiming "Democratization" as its first principle. Co-founder Elon Musk has criticized this drift repeatedly.
Altman closes by inviting scrutiny: "It's very fair to critique us on every decision; we deserve an enormous amount of scrutiny given the weight of what we are doing." Whether OpenAI opens access to the underlying models or continues building proprietary walls around them will tell you more about their principles than any blog post can.