Planning for AGI and Beyond

Planning for AGI and Beyond" (February 2023) is the closest thing OpenAI has published to a strategic doctrine for the AGI transition. Altman and OpenAI lay out their belief that AGI — defined as AI systems that can outperform humans at most economically valuable work — is a genuine near-term possibility, and that the mission is to ensure this development benefits all of humanity rather than any single company, country, or group. The document introduces what became OpenAI's canonical risk framing: the two failure modes are (1) AI that turns against humanity and (2) AI that creates a small group with unchallengeable power — including OpenAI itself. The acknowledgment that OpenAI could itself be the problem if it accrues unchecked power was remarkable for a corporate document. Altman describes the iterative deployment strategy: release incrementally, allow society to adapt, observe what goes wrong, adjust. This graduated approach is contrasted with the alternative — a single massive deployment at capability threshold — which OpenAI argues would be both more dangerous and less correctable. The essay also introduced "superalignment" as a concept: the belief that AI itself will eventually be needed to help align future, more powerful AI systems. Planning for AGI and Beyond functions as the intellectual foundation for everything OpenAI did in 2023–2026: the GPT-4 release, the safety team structure, the board crisis, and the push toward reasoning models.