OpenAI Is Wrapping Itself in the American Flag to Sell "Democratic AI"

Like many Silicon Valley companies, OpenAI is busy wrapping itself in the American flag. Last week, it went a step further, launching an effort to brand itself as a leader in the development of “democratic” artificial intelligence. But as democracy falters in the United States and President Donald Trump drives even the country’s closest allies and neighbors away, will painting itself as red, white, and blue as a can of Budweiser be good for OpenAI’s business? And what will it mean for democracy?

Is “partnering closely with the US government” the best way to advance “democratic” AI?

On May 7, OpenAI announced a new proposition it claims will deliver “democratic AI” to the world. In a blog post titled “Introducing OpenAI for Countries,” the company says it has “heard from many countries asking for help” in developing AI infrastructure. “We want to help these countries, and in the process, spread democratic AI, which means the development, use and deployment of AI that protects and incorporates long-standing democratic principles,” the company said. “Likewise, we believe that partnering closely with the US government is the best way to advance democratic AI.”

The following day, OpenAI CEO and founder Sam Altman appeared on Capitol Hill. Testifying to a Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation hearing titled “Winning the AI Race: Strengthening US Capabilities in Computing and Innovation,” Altman told senators his goal is to get the whole world on an entirely American technology stack. “To me, the stack is from the chips at the bottom to the applications on the top, and we want the whole world on the US stack. We want them to use US chips, we want them to use services like ChatGPT,” he said, later adding, “we should aim to have the entire US stack be adopted by as much of the world as possible.”

The only alternative, in the eyes of OpenAI senior executives, is “autocratic” AI.

"We have a window here to help create pathways so that a large portion of the world is building on democratic AI at a moment when the world's going to have to choose between democratic AI and autocratic [AI]," OpenAI chief global affairs officer Chris Lehane told Axios.

But others doubt the US can be the cradle of “democratic AI” when its own democracy is in jeopardy. As Eileen Guo observed in MIT Technology Review, “some policymakers and business leaders—in Europe, in particular—are reconsidering their reliance on US-based tech and asking whether they can quickly spin up better, homegrown alternatives. This is particularly true for AI.”

Some observers go further. Stanford scholar and former European member of parliament Marietje Schaake argues that by supporting the Trump administration, US tech companies “are actively contributing to the unravelling of an international order based on the rule of law and democracy.” Since Altman is “willing to bend the knee to Trump’s regime,” as Schaake put it, he is a collaborator with an administration that undermines core democratic principles.

Are there other runners in this race? Or will the US box them out?

US firms are betting that the AI race will remain a binary between the US and China. This presumes countries outside the US that choose not to do business with Chinese firms have no alternatives at comparable or even merely sufficient levels of performance, or that they will either prefer or be otherwise incentived to choose US technologies for other reasons, including trade policies that favor US firms.

Both Republicans and Democrats appear to agree that the US government should do what it can to require other countries to “buy American,” as Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) put it at Thursday’s hearing. Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA) went further, calling for a “tech NATO.” Sen. Cantwell said she favors “the five most sophisticated democracies and tech nations setting the rules of the road and saying, this is who you should buy from.”

The Trump administration has made it clear that it will pursue policies that appear nearly perfectly congruent with the goals of industry. As Vice President JD Vance said at the Paris AI Summit in February, the administration’s goal is that “American AI technology continues to be the gold standard worldwide and we are the partner of choice for others—foreign countries and certainly businesses.” Along those lines, after industry opposition, the Trump administration just rescinded rules the Biden administration had introduced to limit the diffusion of AI technologies, including semiconductors and model weights.

So, it’s quite possible that countries will choose to “buy American” even if they are ambivalent or even reticent about relying on US tech firms. But it remains possible that other alternatives will emerge; Europeans increasingly regard developing an independent technology stack as a priority, and even as it courts firms such as OpenAI, India hopes to offer a third way. Still, the biggest risk to the dominance of US firms is that frontier models become commoditized, a possibility raised by the success of the Chinese application DeepSeek.

In any event, other countries are not powerless. “Emerging economies in Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia are not just passive recipients of AI technologies,” Australian ambassador for cyber affairs and critical technology Tobias Feakin noted on Aspen Digital. “They are actively influencing the direction of AI development, adoption, and governance,” he wrote.

Data centers, entrepreneurship, and democracy… backed by the full faith and credit of OpenAI?

OpenAI is betting that another vector to lock in international relationships is through partnering with countries “to build in-country data center capacity.” In its May 7 announcement, the company said these imagined “secure data centers will help support the sovereignty of a country’s data, build new local industries, and make it easy to customize AI and leverage their data in a private and compliant way.”

This appears to be an extension of its strategy to make itself essential infrastructure in the US. Indeed, OpenAI’s infrastructure plan kicked into high gear with the election of Donald Trump. The day after he was inaugurated, President Trump hosted Altman in the Roosevelt Room in the White House, where he joined Oracle founder Larry Ellison and Softbank CEO Masayoshi Son to announce Stargate, a $100 billion initiative to build data centers across the US. “We wouldn't be able to do this without you, Mr. President,” Altman said at the time. “The fact that we get to do this in the United States is, I think, wonderful. So thank you very much.” Now, OpenAI is inviting other countries to join in “expanding the global Stargate Project—and thus in continued US-led AI leadership and a global, growing network effect for democratic AI.”

Beyond partnering on infrastructure, Altman is also promising to go into business with other nations. OpenAI proposes the creation of national startup funds seeded with “local as well as OpenAI capital,” with the goal of developing “healthy national AI ecosystems so the new infrastructure is creating new jobs, new companies, new revenue, and new communities for each country while also supporting existing public- and private-sector needs.”

How many nations will have an appetite for hitching their wagons to Altman and OpenAI remains to be seen. The company aims to initiate “10 projects with individual countries or regions,” and “expand from there.” But in creating these relationships, what trade-offs will OpenAI have to make to satisfy governments? As Miranda Bogen, director of the AI Governance Lab at the Center for Democracy & Technology, told Fortune’s Sharon Goldman:

Building AI that’s attuned to the needs of ordinary people in their own languages has the potential to provide real value … But partnering with nation states raises serious questions about how to protect human rights against government demands. This has been a thorny challenge for tech companies over the past two decades; it’s only going to be more true with AI.

These concerns may be tested sooner rather than later. This week, Altman is set to travel to the Middle East, where the New York Times reports tech executives will be "rubbing shoulders with Saudi ministers and White House officials at an investment forum that will focus partly on partnerships in AI and data centers."

Corporate colonialism with a red, white, and blue bow?

Of course, none of these considerations even scratch the surface of all the ways that OpenAI’s products—and AI more generally—may eventually prove to be fundamentally anti-democratic, from the epistemic challenges they present to concerns over privacy and concentration of power raised by the technology.

Ultimately, the question isn't whether OpenAI can deliver on these ambitious promises, but whether its vision of state-sanctioned AI development will serve democratic ideals or merely export Silicon Valley's profit-driven model under a patriotic banner. In promising to be all things to all nations while emphasizing its relationship with the US government and its American identity, OpenAI may find that the price of global expansion is betraying the democratic principles it claims to advance.