Because of the unusual history of OpenAI, the Government had far more of a say than normal for a company. Remember, OpenAI was originally created as a California non-profit (a charity doing work to create a better AI future). As a charity, it doesn't have to pay the same taxes as it would as a for-profit company, but in exchange it has more rules it needs to follow. And then it released ChatGPT, it exploded in value, it needed to raise truly absurd amounts of capital in order to get to the next model, and thus the lawyers had to spend a good long time extracting the company from the charity.
For very good reasons, the laws make it hard to go from a charity to a for-profit company- because if you could easily transition between the two you could game tax laws with ease. In the end, being allowed to do this required negotiations, and promising to keep OpenAI in California- where they would be subject to other California regulations and taxes in the future.
If they had a "normal" corporate history- had been founded as a Delaware S Corp from the beginning- then this wouldn't be a thing and they would be free to move as they like(1). But, being a weird charity probably helped them attract talent in the critical beginning phases (before it became a money race with Zuck), and it has consequences now.
1: Just as an example, Palantir moved their corporate headquarters to Denver from Palo Alto years ago without a peep from the CA government.
> a California non-profit (a charity doing work to create a better AI future)
Note: non-profit != charity. (All charities are non-profits. Not all non-profits are charities. PACs and non-profit hospitals, for example, are not charities, though the latter can have charitable arms.)
While that is true in the general case, OpenAI was founded as a 501(c)3 to whom all donations were tax-deductible, which is why I used non-profit and charity interchangeably in describing it in particular. There was a for-profit subsidiary spun up in 2019, four years after the original non-profit was created. But it was still owned and operated by the larger non-profit charity organization.
See, for example, Charity Navigator's page on OpenAI: https://www.charitynavigator.org/ein/810861541
I don't know whether or not OpenAI should be allowed to convert to a for profit corporation. That sounds like a complex legal question. But I'm pretty damn sure that the decision absolutely shouldn't depend on whether or not the company stays in CA to provide a cash cow for the government on IPO. This whole thing reeks of corruption.