Somebody else asked this very eloquently: If AGI is here, why does OpenAI need us to prompt it? They could just go and tell it "make as much money as possible" or "make Sam Altman God Emperor of Mankind" and it would go do that. It would not need any of our ideas or guidance.
As long as they're still looking for prompting customers, they're clearly not there yet. There is some solace in that.
One obvious answer is that they believe that human flourishing is best obtained by letting individuals command the AI, rather than the other way around. OpenAI (and Anthropic) is in the end still run by humans who have concern for the human race broadly, both in and of itself and to ensure their personal wellbeing is maximised.
I doubt the truthfulness your second sentence. If they have concern for the human race broadly, they have yet to show any of it. What they have shown is a complete lack of 'alignment' (to borrow a tired term) with human values, laws and basic decency.
For that to be the case we’d have to assume some level of altruism, when so for we’ve only seen self interested actions whitewashed as altruistic.
As I pointed out, even if they were totally self-interested they would not want human agency replaced with AI agency, because they are humans.
“They would not want” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. There exists a group of people with influence in the AI industry who believe in AI successionism: https://spectrum.ieee.org/agi-worthy-successor
Interesting, but this is not the dominant ideology either at exec level or at employee level. From what I can tell it's more immortal humans owning their own fractions of the light cone.
They would want their own agency. After that, we can’t assume anything. They might even think reducing the autonomy of us in the flyovers and replacing it with AI is for our own good.
People can not be trusted to preserve the agency of others. See history.
Would you release AGI to the general populous if you had it internally is the opposing question.