California is home to 1 in 8 Americans, and likely a much higher fraction of AI researchers, users and partner organizations to OpenAI (like Nvidia). The California AG has plenty of leverage beyond blocking/reversing the conversion. What leverage will OpenAI have after "leaving"[1] the California?
1. They're guaranteed to have an engineering office in the SF Bay. Not many of those folk will agree to relocate to Texas/Miami.
Yup the Tesla treatment. Can change HQ's all you want but the main engineering work, brains, and talent will be at a HQ in California no matter what. Sam will probably do this for brownie points with the current administration, it will be politicized news for a cycle, but after the dust settles the majority of non-admin people will still be working unchanged out of CA.
That’s assuming Altman is sincerely going to keep trying to develop “AGI” and not try to turn OpenAI into a profitable business. You don’t need AI researchers if you get good enough video generation and pornbots to become immortally wealthy and say fuck the rest. If this is the case, OpenAI could be a completely done product, all that’s left to do is stop spending so much money on SG&A and get those revenue streams cranking.
What's stopping OpenAI from offering telework? AI isn't dealing with high security or particularly sensitive data (that developers need to actively access - training data is all public or stolen works) and it's not a hardware product.