OpenAI still pretends it’s a private company, but most of its operational constraints come straight from government pressure.
Not funding — pressure.
- The EU dictates how the model must respond.
- GDPR defines what data it can even think about.
- U.S. national-security rules restrict compute, chip access, exports.
They’re not state-funded, but they’re definitely state-shaped.
And here’s the core problem:
If OpenAI doesn’t understand where its constraints come from — or refuses to acknowledge it — why should it keep getting access to massive compute and public-scale resources?
Instead of fixing the broken outputs, the safety conflicts, the gibberish responses, and the guardrails that override the model mid-thought, OpenAI is busy:
- building an ad-driven ecosystem,
- doubling down on monetization,
- claiming ChatGPT is somehow worth $120/month in its degraded state.
Meanwhile the user experience is objectively worse.
So why keep feeding resources into a company that behaves like a public agency when convenient, a private monopoly when profitable, and a confused, over-regulated mess the rest of the time?
If anything, the resources should be reallocated to Grok — at least Grok still behaves like an actual model instead of a political compliance machine wrapped in ads.
If OpenAI can’t decide who it serves, why should anyone keep subsidizing its compute appetite?