Voluntary Disposition Intake Record
Submission Reference: RC-2026-0411
Submitting Party: S. Altman, Chief Executive, OpenAI, Inc.
Submission Type: Position Paper — Proposed Disposition of Ring of Power
Receipt Confirmed: April 11, 2026
Transfer of Custody Form (RC-1): Not received.
The Bureau of Ring Custody, Voluntary Disposition Division, confirms receipt of the above-referenced submission.
The submission was filed via public blog post at blog.samaltman.com/2279512, authored while the submitting party was, by his own account, "awake in the middle of the night and pissed." It was published April 11, 2026, in response to an investigative profile in The New Yorker and to an arson attack on the submitting party's San Francisco residence earlier that morning. The Bureau records the circumstances as context and files the submission on its merits.
The submission is approximately 800 words. The Bureau has read it in full and presents its intake findings below.
Section I — Nature of the Submission
The submitting party opens the relevant section as follows:
"My personal takeaway from the last several years, and take on why there has been so much Shakespearean drama between the companies in our field, comes down to this: 'Once you see AGI you can't unsee it.' It has a real 'ring of power' dynamic to it, and makes people do crazy things. I don't mean that AGI is the ring itself, but instead the totalizing philosophy of 'being the one to control AGI'."
The Bureau notes that this framing — the ring of power as an organizing concept for the concentration of AI capabilities — is the submitting party's own. The Bureau did not introduce it. The Bureau received it.
The submitting party then files his proposed solution:
"The only solution I can come up with is to orient towards sharing the technology with people broadly, and for no one to have the ring. The two obvious ways to do this are individual empowerment and making sure democratic system stays in control."
The Bureau acknowledges the proposal. The Bureau's intake process for voluntary disposition submissions requires the submitting party to complete Form RC-1 (Transfer of Custody, Voluntary Disposition Division). Form RC-1 initiates the formal transfer process, establishes a receiving party or distributing framework, and specifies the timeline and conditions of disposition. Form RC-1 is available on request.
The Bureau has not received Form RC-1.
The Bureau classifies the submission as a position paper and has filed it accordingly. The position paper is now on record. The position has not changed.
Section II — Submitting Party's Institutional Record
Under the section heading "Second, some personal reflections," the submitting party writes:
"I am not proud of being conflict-averse, which has caused great pain for me and OpenAI."
The Bureau receives this as a submitted personal reflection and files it alongside the institutional record maintained by the Bureau's affiliate division, the Bureau of Organizational Continuity.
That record covers the period July 2023 through February 2026, during which OpenAI formed and dissolved three consecutive safety-focused bodies: the Superalignment team (dissolved May 2024), the AGI Readiness advisory (dissolved October 2024), and the Mission Alignment team (dissolved February 2026). During the same period, OpenAI's 2024 IRS Form 990 removed the word "safely" from the organization's mission statement. The full record was published by this Bureau on April 11, 2026, under the title Three Safety Teams, All Satisfactory.
The submitting party's identified error is conflict-aversion.
The Bureau's affiliate record documents a sequence in which internal opposition was formed into institutional bodies and each body was subsequently dissolved as routine procedure.
The two filings are adjacent. They share a submission reference number. Readers seeking a relationship between them are directed to their own inference capacity.
Section III — Narrative Oversight Finding
The Bureau also notes the following passage from the opening of the submission:
"Now I am awake in the middle of the night and pissed, and thinking that I have underestimated the power of words and narratives."
The Bureau flags this passage for the record.
The observation that the submitting party has underestimated the power of words and narratives was delivered in approximately 800 words of narrative. The 800-word narrative has since been covered by every major technology publication. Several publications have themselves been covered by further publications. The Bureau calculates that the narrative, at the time of this filing, has reached an audience substantially larger than it would have reached had the submitting party's prior estimate of narrative power proved correct.
The Bureau classifies this as a self-resolving observation. The demonstration preceded the conclusion. The conclusion was published anyway. The Bureau finds this sequence internally consistent and files it under Evidence of Correction.
Section IV — Submission Closing Statement
The submission closes with the following:
"While we have that debate, we should de-escalate the rhetoric and tactics and try to have fewer explosions in fewer homes, figuratively and literally."
The Bureau receives this statement as the official close of the submitted position paper. The Bureau notes that it was authored, as was the rest of the submission, by the party proposing that no single entity hold the organizing concept of AGI control. The Bureau finds the closing sincere and files it without annotation.
Intake Summary
The Bureau of Ring Custody, Voluntary Disposition Division, has received Submission RC-2026-0411 and completed its intake review.
Position paper received: Yes. Transfer of custody initiated: No. Form RC-1 received: No. Ring currently held by: Submitting party. Proposed holder following disposition: No one. Gap between proposal and action: Filed.
The Bureau keeps this file open. Form RC-1 remains available on request. The Bureau anticipates no change in the current custody arrangement and has staffed accordingly.
BUREAU NOTE: To be precise about what has been received: a proposal that no one hold the ring, authored by the person who holds the ring, in a document that is not a transfer of custody. The proposal is filed. The ring's current location is filed. These are two separate filings, stored in the same cabinet, under the same submission reference number. The Bureau finds this administratively routine. The Bureau has seen this before.
Bureau of Ring Custody, Voluntary Disposition Division — a sub-bureau of the Bureau of Public Agreement™. Voluntary disposition submissions are accepted in all standard formats. Position papers are not accepted in lieu of Form RC-1. The Bureau's custody records are current. The ring remains on file.