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Coalition urges California attorney general to halt OpenAI's for-profit restructuring

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Coalition urges California attorney general to halt OpenAI's for-profit restructuring

A coalition of California nonprofits, foundations and labor groups are raising concerns about ChatGPT maker OpenAI, urging the state attorney general to halt the artificial intelligence startup’s plans to restructure itself as a for-profit company.

More than 50 organizations, led by LatinoProsperity and the San Francisco Foundation, signed a petition that was sent to Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta’s office on Wednesday, requesting he investigate the Sam Altman-led company.

“OpenAI began its work with the goal of developing AI to benefit humanity as a whole, but its current attempt to alter its corporate structure reveals its new goal: providing AI’s benefits — the potential for untold profits and control over what may become powerful world-altering technologies — to a handful of corporate investors and high-level employees,” the petition said.

San Francisco-based OpenAI began as a nonprofit in 2015 and later launched a for-profit subsidiary to oversee its commercial operations. Currently, the nonprofit’s board oversees that subsidiary, which develops products and services including ChatGPT and text-to-video tool Sora.

But as the competition among AI companies heated up, OpenAI said it needed to change its business structure to raise more money. In December, OpenAI said it would explore transitioning its commercial subsidiary into a public benefit corporation, a type of for-profit business where the OpenAI nonprofit would have an ownership stake but would no longer control it.

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When OpenAI began as a nonprofit research lab, there were no plans for a product — just plans to put out research papers, Altman told newsletter Stratechery in March.

Over time, OpenAI has grown to be a leader in the AI space, with 500 million people using ChatGPT weekly. If he could go back, Altman said he would have set up the company differently.

“We knew that scaling computers was going to be important, but we still really underestimated how much we needed to scale them,” Altman said in a conversation with Harvard Business School.

Other AI startups including Anthropic and xAI are public benefit corporations.

The proposed change in OpenAI’s structure raised eyebrows among some nonprofit leaders. The petition was doubtful that OpenAI’s charitable assets would be protected, accused OpenAI of not complying with nonprofit rules and raised concerns that other startups would use a nonprofit structure “to create accelerated and amplified possibilities for individual financial benefit.”

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OpenAI’s nonprofit board went through a major shakeup in 2023. The board voted to fire Altman for alleged lack of consistent candor in his communications with board members. He was later reinstated five days later and the board was restructured, with several opposing board members leaving.

This month, OpenAI said it completed a $40-billion funding round led by SoftBank, bringing its valuation to $300 billion. As part of the deal, SoftBank can reduce its investment if OpenAI does not change its corporate structure by the end of the year.

Unlike for-profit businesses, nonprofits are limited in how funds raised are used.

“They can’t sell stock or offer returns,” said Neil Elan, a partner at law firm Stubbs, Alderton and Markiles LLP. “Equity is what drives a lot of these high valuation models. It’s also difficult to fully compete with Meta, Microsoft and Google, which have access to a lot more resources … without comparable funding.”

OpenAI now ranks as the second most valuable privately held company, tied with TikTok’s parent company ByteDance, according to research firm CB Insights. The private firm with the highest valuation is Elon Musk’s SpaceX at $350 billion.

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“This is a kind of unprecedented conversion in terms of its size and we just want to make sure that the attorney general really exercises his powers to protect those charitable assets,” said Orson Aguilar, CEO and founding president of LatinoProsperity, an L.A.-based nonprofit that focuses on advancing policies that build wealth in the Latino community.

Some nonprofit leaders said what’s happening with OpenAI reminds them of the transition that nonprofit healthcare providers made to for-profits in the 1990s. Government leaders stepped in to help regulate that process.

LatinoProsperity, San Francisco Foundation and other nonprofits first raised concerns to the attorney general in January.

Bonta has sought more information regarding OpenAI’s restructuring, with his deputy attorney general reaching out to the AI startup and requesting it provide more details. Earlier this year, Bonta’s office told news outlet CalMatters that it’s an ongoing investigation and the department “is committed to protecting charitable assets for their intended purpose and takes this responsibility seriously.”

Aguilar says “there hasn’t been any meaningful action.”

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Some of OpenAI’s competitors have opposed the company’s plans. Last year, Meta wrote to the attorney general. Musk, a co-founder of OpenAI who now runs rival xAI, sued OpenAI, seeking to stop OpenAI from changing its corporate structure.

Nathanael Fast, director of the Neely Center for Ethical Leadership and Decision Making at USC Marshall School of Business, thinks OpenAI will be able to move forward with its plans despite the opposition.

“The big question is, what will happen to the values that they have once all the dust settles and they become a corporation that is competing with other for-profit corporations?” Fast said. “Will they have unique values that they hold on to from their early days as a nonprofit? Or will they look just like any other profit-oriented company?”

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Movie Reviews

Movie Review – SHAKA: A STORY OF ALOHA

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Movie Review – SHAKA: A STORY OF ALOHA
SHAKA: A STORY OF ALOHA is shared with the audience by investigator Steve Sue in a calm and charming manner, but this documentary tells a powerful, positive and fascinating story. The “hang loose” thumb, pinky sign that originated in Hawaii and carries many meanings is the focus of this film. I just learned this gesture is called a “Shaka” and has a worldwide impact.  And, there are Shaka Contests.  Who knew? And how do you throw a Shaka? For me, […]
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Tommy Lee Jones’ daughter reportedly found dead at San Francisco hotel on New Year’s Day

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Tommy Lee Jones’ daughter reportedly found dead at San Francisco hotel on New Year’s Day

Victoria Jones, the daughter of Academy Award-winning actor Tommy Lee Jones, was reportedly found dead at a hotel in San Francisco on New Year’s Day. She was 34.

According to TMZ, the San Francisco Fire Department responded to a medical emergency call at the Fairmont San Francisco early Thursday morning. The paramedics pronounced Victoria dead at the scene before turning it over to the San Francisco Police Department for further investigation, the outlet said.

An SFPD representative confirmed to The Times that officers responded to a call at approximately 3:14 a.m. Thursday regarding a report of a deceased person at the hotel and that they met with medics at the scene who declared an unnamed adult female dead.

Citing law enforcement sources, NBC Bay Area also reported that the deceased woman found in a hallway of the hotel was believed to be Jones and that police did not suspect foul play.

“We are deeply saddened by an incident that occurred at the hotel on January 1, 2026,” the Fairmont told NBC Bay Area in a statement. “Our heartfelt condolences are with the family and loved ones during this very difficult time. The hotel team is actively cooperating and supporting police authorities within the framework of the ongoing investigation.”

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The medical examiner conducted an investigation at the scene, but Jones’ cause of death remains undetermined. Dispatch audio obtained by TMZ and People indicated that the 911 emergency call was for a suspected drug overdose.

Jones was the daughter of Tommy Lee and ex-wife Kimberlea Cloughley. Her brief acting career included roles on films such as “Men in Black II” (2002), which starred her father, and “The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada” (2005), which was directed by her father. She also appeared in a 2005 episode of “One Tree Hill.”

Page Six reported that Jones had been arrested at least twice in 2025 in Napa County, including an arrest on suspicion of being under the influence of a controlled substance and drug possession.

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Movie Reviews

Movie Review: “I Was a Stranger” and You Welcomed Me

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Movie Review: “I Was a Stranger” and You Welcomed Me

Just when you think that you’ve seen and heard all sides of the human migration debate, and long after you fear that the cruel, the ignorant and the scapegoaters have won that shouting match, a film comes along and defies ignorance and prejudice by both embracing and upending the conventional “immigrant” narrative.

“I Was a Strranger” is the first great film of 2026. It’s cleverly written, carefully crafted and beautifully-acted with characters who humanize many facets of the “migration” and “illegal immigration” debate. The debut feature of writer-director Brandt Andersen, “Stranger” is emotional and logical, blunt and heroic. It challenges viewers to rethink their preconceptions and prejudices and the very definition of “heroic.”

The fact that this film — which takes its title from the Book of Matthew, chapter 25, verse 35 — is from the same faith-based film distributor that made millions by feeding the discredited human trafficking wish fulfillment fantasy “Sound of Freedom” to an eager conservative Christian audience makes this film something of a minor miracle in its own right.

But as Angel Studios has also urged churchgoers not just to animated Nativity stories (“The King of Kings”) and “David” musicals, but Christian resistence to fascism (“Truth & Treason” and “Bonheoffer”) , their atonement is almost complete.

Andersen deftly weaves five compact but saga-sized stories about immigrants escaping from civil-war-torn Syria into a sort of interwoven, overlapping “Babel” or “Crash” about migration.

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“The Doctor” is about a Chicago hospital employee (Yasmine Al Massri of “Palestine 36” and TV’s “Quantico”) whose flashback takes us to the hospital in Aleppo, Syria, bombed and terrorized by the Assad regime’s forces, and what she and her tween daughter (Massa Daoud) went through to escape — from literally crawling out of a bombed building to dodging death at the border to the harrowing small boat voyage from Turkey to Greece.

“The Soldier” follows loyal Assad trooper Mustafa (Yahya Mahayni was John the Baptist in Martin Scorsese Presents: The Saints”) through his murderous work in Aleppo, and the crisis of conscience that finally hits him as he sees the cruel and repressive regime he works for at its most desperate.

“The Smuggler” is Marwan, a refugee-camp savvy African — played by the terrific French actor Omar Sy of “The Intouchables” and “The Book of Clarence” — who cynically makes his money buying disposable inflatable boats, disposable outboards and not-enough-life-jackets in Turkey to smuggle refugees to Greece.

“The Poet” (Ziad Bakri of “Screwdriver”) just wants to get his Syrian family of five out of Turkey and into Europe on Marwan’s boat.

And “The Captain” (Constantine Markoulakis of “The Telemachy”) commands a Hellenic Coast Guard vessel, a man haunted by the harrowing rescues he must carry out daily and visions of the bodies of those he doesn’t.

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Andersen, a Tampa native who made his mark producing Tom Cruise spectacles (“American Made”), Mel Gibson B-movies (“Panama”) and the occasional “Everest” blockbuster, expands his short film “Refugee” to feature length for “I Was a Stranger.” He doesn’t so much alter the formula or reinvent this genre of film as find points of view that we seldom see that force us to reconsider what we believe through their eyes.

Sy’s Smuggler has a sickly little boy that he longs to take to Chicago. He runs his ill-gotten-gains operation, profiting off human misery, to realize that dream. We see glimpses of what might be compassion, but also bullying “customers” and his new North African assistant (Ayman Samman). Keeping up the hard front he shows one and all, we see him callously buy life jackets in the bazaar — never enough for every customer to have one in any given voyage.

The Captain sits for dinner with family and friends and has to listen to Greek prejudices and complaints about this human life and human rights crisis, which is how the worlds sees Greece reacting to this “invasion.” But as he and his first mate recount lives saved and the horrors of lives lost, that quibbling is silenced.

Here and there we see and hear (in Arabic and Greek with subtitles, and English) little moments of “rising above” human pettiness and cruelty and the simple blessings of kindness.

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“I Was a Stranger” was finished in 2024 and arrives in cinemas at one of the bleakest moments in recent history. Cruelty is running amok, unchecked and unpunished. Countries are being destabilized, with the fans of alleged “strong man” rule cheering it on.

Andersen carefully avoids politics — Middle Eastern, Israeli, European and American — save for the opening scene’s zoom in on that Chicago hospital, passing a gaudily named “Trump” hotel in the process, and a general condemnation of Syria’s Assad mob family regime.

But Andersen’s bold movie, with its message so against the grain of current events, compromised media coverage and the mostly conservative audience that has become this film distributor’s base, plays like a wet slap back to reality.

And as any revival preacher will tell you, putting a positive message out there in front of millions is the only way to convert hundreds among the millions who have lost their way.

star

Rating: PG-13, violence, smoking, racial slurs

Cast: Yasmine Al Massri, Yahya Mahayni, Ziad Bakri, Omar Sy, Ayman Samman, Massa Daoud, Jason Beghe and Constantine Markoulakis

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Credits: Scripted and directed by Brandt Andersen. An Angel Studios release.

Running time: 1:43

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About Roger Moore

Movie Critic, formerly with McClatchy-Tribune News Service, Orlando Sentinel, published in Spin Magazine, The World and now published here, Orlando Magazine, Autoweek Magazine

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