Big changes are happening at OpenAI. On Wednesday, the company announced that it would be shutting down their AI video creation app Sora only a couple months after its launch. In October, OpenAI completed a massive restructure of its organization that shakes the very foundations it was built on. 

OpenAI, which powers ChatGPT, among other AI products, was originally founded purely as a nonprofit. Now it has a for-profit arm. According to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, the nonprofit will still guide the work of the for-profit side to ensure that artificial intelligence works for the “benefit of all humanity.” On top of that, the OpenAI Foundation, would be in charge of (theoretically) $180 billion, making it one of the largest charitable organizations in the world. 

Catherine Bracy, founder of the nonprofit Tech Equity, thinks this restructuring is a blatant attempt to free up the for-profit wing to act like any other AI company. She argues that OpenAI’s for-profit wing will only ever act for the benefit of its investors. Bracy believes the OpenAI Foundation is merely a glorified and toothless corporate social responsibility arm. We reached out to OpenAI for comment and did not receive a response. 

Bracy spoke with Today, Explained host Sean Rameswaram about the legality of OpenAI’s new structure and her concerns about how this all might shake out. An excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity, is below.

There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

(Disclosure: Vox Media is one of several publishers that have signed partnership agreements with OpenAI. Our reporting remains editorially independent.)

You used to chat with Sam Altman? 

We worked together back in the day and then kind of went out of touch with each other for a few years. Then, when I was writing a book about venture capital, I was really interested in open AI’s nonprofit model. Sam had been very explicit that the reason they founded OpenAI as a nonprofit was to put the technology at arm’s length from investors because they knew investors would exploit it in a way that would make this technology — which they thought was very dangerous — actually live up to that potential danger. 

So I wanted to talk to him about the decision-making process behind that. And he was very forthcoming about that being the explicit reason why OpenAI was founded as a nonprofit. They put a lot of thought and capacity and energy into creating this [nonprofit] governance structure that would protect the technology from the whims of investors, the [profit-generating] imperatives that investors put on technology companies. 

And a few months later, I saw that all come crashing down. 

And when you found out that Open AI was restructuring and going to try to have it both ways — mission-driven nonprofit, but also money-driven for-profit — what was your reaction?

Disappointment. I would say that was my initial reaction. And then the secondary response was, Well, what can we do about this? And many of us came together into this coalition that really started asking questions about the responsibility of the nonprofit and the responsibility of the attorney general of California to enforce nonprofit law. And things kind of went from there.

Tell me more about that. What’s nonprofit law look like as it pertains to, say, OpenAI?

I run a nonprofit. In the tax code, that means that my organization does not need to pay taxes, but in return for that tax exemption, we are required to operate in service of a public service mission. Our mission is to ensure that the tech industry is creating opportunity for everybody. OpenAI’s nonprofit mission is to ensure that AI develops for the benefit of all of humanity. And legally, Sam Altman is required to prioritize OpenAI’s mission above all else.

So when they decided they were going to split the nonprofit from the for-profit, they found that actually legally they could not do that without divesting the intellectual property that the nonprofit owned, including all of the intellectual property that was created that underlies the ChatGPT model, and the equity stake that the nonprofit owned in the for-profit company. 

I think they looked at that price tag and they said, That’s not a price we’re willing to pay. And so instead of splitting the nonprofit from the for-profit, they decided to continue down this path of nonprofit ownership, which in my mind is completely untenable, unsustainable, and irreconcilable. 

Basically, every day that OpenAI exists, they are violating the law. 

And actually what they’re doing is just daring the attorney general to hold them accountable for it. I think they think they’re too big to be held accountable and they need the AG [of California] to assume that he will not win a case. And that’s what they’ve done. They’ve loaded up on lawyers and they are making a bet that the AG will not pursue this in any way that’s actually meaningful.

Okay. So if I’m following you, despite the fact that OpenAI has split itself into a for-profit arm and a not-for-profit arm, their not-for-profit mission still overrides everything they do. And because of that, they are violating California law — because there’s no way that the nonprofit interests are ever going to be primary in their business.

Right. I think, as the kids would say, they’re playing in our faces. They expect us to take their word that as they operate, as they make deals with the Defense Department to develop autonomous weapons and surveillance systems on American citizens, as they battle parents in court whose children have committed suicide due to conversations that these kids were having with their chatbots, they expect us to believe that the nonprofit mission is being prioritized over the profit motivation of the company.

We all know that OpenAI’s overriding priority is to “win” the AI race. It’s to beat out the competition in the marketplace, and it’s to establish the biggest AI company they can create. To the extent that the nonprofit mission ever comes into tension with that, the company will always prioritize profits over the mission.

A law is only as good as its enforcement. And I think if there’s one rule of Silicon Valley, it is to ask forgiveness and not permission. I think they said, You know, this is worth it. There’s enough money on the line for us to just break the law and do the PR work and the lobbying work and the other work that we need to do to ensure that these laws will never be enforced against us.

And when you talk about PR work, lobbying work, are you talking about, like, saying we’re going to give away this $180 billion eventually?

Well, here’s the thing. They announced this week a list of priorities that the foundation would be investing in. They listed as one of their priorities, Alzheimer’s research. My mother is currently dying of Alzheimer’s. I have one copy of the gene that puts me at extreme risk of developing Alzheimer’s when I’m older. So I pray every day that AI helps us find a solution to Alzheimer’s fast enough that I can benefit from it, that my family can benefit from it. 

But let me ask you a question. What happens, do you think, if the research that’s funded by OpenAI’s Foundation finds that actually Anthropic’s models are better at drug discovery or scientific breakthroughs than ChatGPT or any of OpenAI’s other models? What does it mean for the independence of scientific research, if all of this research is funded by an entity that has an irreconcilable conflict of interest?

We would not accept the science around nicotine that tobacco companies were funding. We do not accept the science around alcohol addiction that the alcohol companies fund. We do not accept the science around sugared beverages from the soda industry. And we should not accept that this scientific research is funded by an entity that has a vested financial interest in the outcome. 

And that is why it is so critically important that the OpenAI Foundation actually be independent, that it have an independent board, that it can deploy its resources independently, that the research that it is funding is independent. 

Do you still think that we’re maybe better off that OpenAI says that they want to give billions away to better society — than say Anthropic, Google, maybe having some pledges to give money away, but not nearly as much?

Well, Google has a corporate foundation. It’s called Google.org. And I expect in this structure with the tension and the conflict of interest that the OpenAI Foundation has, that it will operate much more like Google.org, which is essentially an arm of the marketing department, a corporate social responsibility program that gives money to innocuous groups — but will never do anything that undercuts Google’s priorities. 

I think if you read between the lines of open AI’s press release, the work they say they want to continue doing with community funding is all about convincing people about the importance and value and benefit in using AI. I mean, that’s a market building opportunity for them. That’s not actually anything that’s going to ensure that AI is developed for the benefit of humanity. And so, no, I don’t think that they’re going to operate any differently than any of the other companies’ corporate social responsibility arms. That’s essentially what they have built here. 

This is the fight of our time. AI is not inevitable. The way it develops is not inevitable. And we do not have to take these companies at their word that they know best how to govern this technology. We should have bigger imaginations about what’s possible. And if anything, this should give us more energy and motivation to fix what’s broken about our democracy than to just sit back and let billionaires control our future.

Do you ever talk to Sam Altman anymore?

He doesn’t return my calls. 

Well, thanks for talking to us.

Just over a year ago, OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy coined the term “vibe coding” and it’s exactly what it sounds like. In a post on X, he wrote that it’s where “you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists.”

Since then, coders from all backgrounds — and folks with zero experience — have tapped into their vibes to make apps and websites. Vibe coding platforms, powered by AI models like Claude, Codex, and Gemini, have gained traction as a way to give normies a toolset to code whatever they want, without writing a single line of script. 

Tech behemoths like Amazon and bustling Silicon Valley startups even have their coders using it. It’s doing the grunt work for now, but they say it’s opening up a whole new world of possibilities. One possibility: It takes their job. But it’s a trade-off that some of them are willing to make. 

Clive Thompson wrote a book about this and spent time with over 70 vibe coders to understand how the technology is upending the industry and if this is the end of computer programming as we know it. On Today, Explained, co-host Sean Rameswaram dug into these questions and even vibe coded a simple website while doing it.

Below is an excerpt of the conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

You spent a lot of time hanging out with coders who were vibe coding. And from what I could tell from reading your piece in the New York Times Magazine is that they’re not vibe coding the same way that I was vibe coding.  

No, they’re doing something that’s a lot more aggressive and ambitious. What they’re doing is they are using multiple agents, kind of swarms of agents at the same time. If they’re using Claude Code or Codex or Gemini they will have it wired into their laptops. Those agents can create files, destroy files. They can take code that’s been written, they can push it live into production in the world. 

And they will also work little teams. So when they want to create a piece of software, sometimes they’ll write, like, a spec, like a page saying, “Here’s what I want to do.” Or sometimes they’ll just talk to the agent. But they’ll be kind of talking to the lead agent that’s going to be the head of the team and they’ll talk to it and say, “Here’s what I want you to do. What do you think? Give me your ideas.” And they’ll sort of go back and forth generating a plan. And when they’re confident that this top agent understands what is to be done, they’ll say, “All right. Go do it.”

And that one will spawn off several subagents. It will have one agent that’s writing code, another one that is testing the code. It’s quite wild to watch them do this. And sometimes if it does something wrong, they’ll have to yell at it. They’ll be like, “This is unacceptable.” Or they’ll say things like, you know, “This is embarrassing. You’re humiliating me.” 

And I said to him, “What’s up with that? Does that language improve the sort of output of these agents?” And he was like, “I couldn’t prove it. But generally we find that when we sort of reprimand them a little bit, they become a little more reliable.” 

Can you help us understand just how much time, money, human labor is being saved by vibe coding at the level that you observed?

Yeah, it can be really significant. They’re most significant when someone is building something new from scratch. The startup founders, one- or two-person, three-person shops, they’re like, “I need to get to market fast. There might be 10 other people with this idea. I got to beat them.” It’s dizzying. Some of those people were telling me that they were working 20 times faster than they would on their own. Stuff that would normally have taken them a day now takes half an hour. 

But at a very large and mature company like Amazon or Google, you’ve got billions of lines of existing code and if one little part of it stops working, that could cascade through everything. So those folks are definitely using the agents, but they are less likely to be pushing stuff rapidly out. They’re more likely to be looking carefully at it and putting it through what’s known as code review, where multiple humans look at it and go, “Oh, okay, does that work?” So for them, basically it’s like a 10 percent improvement in terms of the velocity of productivity of the engineers, how fast they go from having an idea to making it happen. 

And what’s really interesting, and you may have discovered this too, in your vibe coding: a lot of engineers told me that it was even less about speed than about the ability to experiment with a bunch of ideas and see which one might really work.

In the before times, you’d have an idea for a feature. Are you really going to spend six weeks developing it just to discover that it’s not really what you thought it was going to be? 

Now, well, let’s just do 10 different versions of that over the next week and let’s look at all of them and then we can pick the one we want. You might not necessarily have gone faster, but the feature that you’ve got is exactly the one you wanted and you know because you held it in your hands.

A lot of tech layoffs in the past few years, and now we’re talking about how vibe coding has dramatically overturned the norms in engineering. How are developers feeling about that? 

Well, here’s the thing. So there is definitely a civil war insofar as there is the majority of people that I spoke to, and I reached out to a very wide array — I talked to 75 developers.

And I actively wanted to talk to ones that didn’t like AI because I wanted to know their feelings. It’s a minority of people that are really hotly opposed, but they’re very, very strongly opposed. They don’t like the fact that these are trained on stolen materials. They don’t like the fact that it uses tons of energy. They don’t like the fact that they think it’s going to de-skill [people].

Why do you think they’re not the majority, when this is so clearly going to replace so many of them and bypass all of their ethical, moral concerns and objections?

I think it’s because for a lot of developers it’s just such a delightful experience in the short term of going from everything being a slow slog to it being like, “Oh my God, all these ideas and things I wanted to do, I can now try them and do them.”

Because it’s fun, basically.

It’s enormously fun. The pleasure of coding used to be that there were a lot of these little wins when you got something working. Those little wins have gone away because you’re not doing that bug fixing, you’re not doing that line writing. 

So the big wins are just coming in avalanches and it’s very intoxicating. Also, there are ones who essentially don’t think that those bad labor things are going to obtain. They think there’s a potential that more [jobs] will get created in areas that they have previously been unable to be created.

Give it five years for us. Does this harken the end of computer programming as we know it? 

No, I would not go so far as to say that it ends in five years. I do think it becomes something very different potentially. I still think — everyone told me, and I believe — that you still need some understanding of the way a code base works to do the complicated things. 

Weirdly, what you might see is something a little different, which is the explosion of code in areas where there is currently none. There’s a bazillion people out there that are code-adjacent. You work in accounting, you are a wizard at Excel, and you can import data if you’re given the ability now to have an agent say, “Okay, could you bring more data in?” 

There is going to be this really weird world where there’s a lot of customized software for an audience of two, three people. We have thought of software historically as something that only exists if 10,000 people or a million people want it because it costs a lot of money to make it. 

But if you can now start making it for next to nothing, you can start using it the way that we use Post-it notes. Put it all over the place. I need to jot this idea down. I’m going to make this happen. And maybe this software solves one problem for this afternoon and we never use it again. Software starts becoming almost disposable.

Bettors on prediction markets like Polymarket and Kalshi have wagered hundreds of millions of dollars on the current conflict in Iran. Which means lots and lots of folks are trying to get rich betting on wars. 

In the lead-up to the United States and Israel’s attack on Iran, prediction markets saw a frenzy of activity tied to the conflict. Users of prediction markets were putting down money on when the first bombs would drop, as well as where the bombs might hit. But one of the most active markets had people betting on whether Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah ​Ali Khamenei would leave office before March 1. He was killed on February 28. 

“So on Polymarket, there’s a ton of different bets you can make,” Kate Knibbs, a senior writer for Wired, told Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram. “I think they actually just took down some of the markets for missile strikes because of all the backlash that has been going on in response to the fact that you can bet on war because it’s so dystopian.”

This sort of thing has happened in sports and sports betting for years. And it seems likely to happen much more often in response to news events thanks to prediction markets too. Because as Knibbs spelled out to Rameswaram, these markets are becoming increasingly popular. They have the Trump administration on their side. And folks across the globe seem absorbed with the idea of betting on war. 

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

What kind of bets are people making on the war in Iran? 

Especially on Polymarket, there’s a ton of different bets you can make. You could bet on when the Strait of Hormuz is gonna open, or whether it’s gonna open. You could bet on missile strikes. There was famously this market about whether the supreme leader would remain in power or not. There were markets on who his successor was going to be. 

It’s almost like anything you think might be a market, probably is a market, at least on Polymarket, because Kalshi has some stricter rules and its offerings are not quite as morbid. You can’t bet on assassinations, for instance, there. But Polymarket largely exists outside of the United States, so it’s less beholden to US law, or at least that’s how it’s acting. 

How much money are people making on these kinds of bets right now? Do we know? 

With Polymarket, you can see the wallets of the traders. You’re able to see pretty much precisely how much some people are profiting. And you know, like in all gambling, most people who are participating in these markets are actually losing money. 

So the winners are this tiny little percentage. And the winners who are winning big are an even smaller slice of that small slice. So we have a very select group of people who are making, in some cases millions and millions of dollars on war.

And some of those people making millions and millions of dollars kind of looked suspicious, right? Because, I don’t know, they made a big bet the night before the war started that we’d be going to war in a few hours and then they made hundreds of thousands of dollars. 

Yeah. Especially because in a lot of those cases, it wasn’t as though they had this long history of just being super smart and savvy at geopolitical contracts. 

In a lot of these cases, the wallets were just created within days of making these highly suspect trades. And so a lot of different organizations that can trace crypto wallets have been looking at the patterns that are emerging around these war markets and basically saying, “Look, we don’t know exactly who is doing this, but it’s probably insider trading because there’s just no way that these people are popping up out of nowhere to drop a bunch of money and make these incredibly precise bets and profit and then disappear into the ether.”

Is that allowed? Is that within the parameters of what’s allowed on these betting markets? 

It seems like it shouldn’t be, right? It seems morally repugnant. It seems obviously ethically flawed. But when it comes to what is the definition of insider trading, we typically think of it in terms of someone having nonpublic material information about a company that will change how their stocks perform. It has a very specific definition when you’re talking about SEC stock market stuff. 

Prediction markets are regulated differently and there’s sort of a fuzziness around what constitutes non-public material information. If there’s a Google Insider who’s insider trading, it’s kind of obvious, “Oh, they learned these specific facts about how the company is gonna perform.” When it comes to prediction markets, there’s markets on everything. So who’s an insider?

There’s a class action lawsuit against Kalshi right now. What’s going on there? 

Okay, so there are actually a bunch of different class action lawsuits against Kalshi. 

Some of them have been ongoing for a while and are arguing that plaintiffs have been preyed upon by Kalshi because it’s secretly an illegal gambling organization. And those are more like general interest or class actions. 

I think what you’re thinking of is the one that just came out that’s specifically tied to the Khomeini market, where a bunch of people are really, really pissed because when the Ayatollah died, they thought that they were gonna profit because they had bet “yes” in this market that said that he would no longer be in power by “X” date. And then Kalshi came out and said, “Uh, no, we actually don’t allow betting on death. And that’s been in the fine print of our rules this entire time.” So instead of profiting, people got their money back, but they didn’t get the money that they thought that they deserved for correctly participating in the market. And so they’re now suing. 

Do you think what’s happened in the past couple weeks and what people have seen with these sort of brand-new accounts, making tons of money off of a war that’s just starting and wildly controversial is going to be the driving force behind some regulation? 

Well, right now the Trump administration is very friendly towards prediction markets. Donald Trump Jr. is an adviser to both Kalshi and Polymarket. The Trump family is planning on launching their own prediction market called Truth Predict like a spin-off of Truth Social. And the White House hasn’t been commenting directly on the prediction market stuff, but the CFTC, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which is the government agency that regulates these on a federal level, the chairman Michael Selig has like come out swinging saying, “This is our turf. All of these efforts on the state level to make all of these companies abide by state gambling regulations and to put guardrails up, those efforts are something we don’t stand by. We actually strongly disagree with them.”  

I think there’s over 50 different lawsuits flying around about this right now. Some of them, the states stand a chance at winning. And so if the states win, it’ll set a precedent and these prediction markets will no longer be able to operate as they currently are. And that could really change things. But other than that, I don’t see, I don’t see these being curbed in any real way soon.