SAN FRANCISCO  — 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 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. Bonta’s office did not have an immediate comment.In a statement, OpenAI said its board “has been very clear⁠ that we intend to strengthen the non-profit so that it can deliver on its mission for the long term.” “We’re not selling it, we’re doubling down on its work,” the company said. “We look forward to the input and advice from leaders who have experience in community-based organizations on how we can help them achieve their missions, as recently announced by the creation of our advisory Commission.”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 in which the OpenAI nonprofit would have an ownership stake but would no longer control it.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.”OpenAI’s nonprofit board went through a shake-up in 2023. The board voted to fire Altman for alleged lack of consistent candor in his communications with board members. He was reinstated five days later, and the board was restructured, with several opposing board members leaving.Last 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 & Markiles. “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.“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, chief executive and founding president of LatinoProsperity, a Los Angeles-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 startup and requesting it provide more details. Earlier this year, Bonta’s office told news outlet CalMatters that it’s an ongoing investigation and that 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.” 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?” More to Read

When her 14-year-old son took his own life after interacting with artificial intelligence chatbots, Megan Garcia turned her grief into action.Last year, the Florida mom sued Character.AI, a platform where people can create and interact with digital characters that mimic real and fictional people. Garcia alleged in a federal lawsuit that the platform’s chatbots harmed the mental health of her son Sewell Setzer III and the Menlo Park, Calif., company failed to notify her or offer help when he expressed suicidal thoughts to these virtual characters.Now Garcia is backing state legislation that aims to safeguard young people from “companion” chatbots she says “are designed to engage vulnerable users in inappropriate romantic and sexual conversations” and “encourage self-harm.”“Over time, we will need a comprehensive regulatory framework to address all the harms, but right now, I am grateful that California is at the forefront of laying this ground,” Garcia said at a news conference on Tuesday ahead of a hearing in Sacramento to review the bill. Suicide prevention and crisis counseling resources If you or someone you know is struggling with suicidal thoughts, seek help from a professional and call 9-8-8. The United States’ first nationwide three-digit mental health crisis hotline 988 will connect callers with trained mental health counselors. Text “HOME” to 741741 in the U.S. and Canada to reach the Crisis Text Line. As companies move fast to advance chatbots, parents, lawmakers and child advocacy groups are worried there are not enough safeguards in place to protect young people from technology’s potential dangers.To address the problem, state lawmakers introduced a bill that would require operators of companion chatbot platforms to remind users at least every three hours that the virtual characters aren’t human. Platforms would also need to take other steps such as implementing a protocol for addressing suicidal ideation, suicide or self-harm expressed by users. That includes showing users suicide prevention resources.Under Senate Bill 243, the operator of these platforms would also report the number of times a companion chatbot brought up suicide ideation or actions with a user, along with other requirements.The legislation, which cleared the Senate Judiciary Committee, is just one way state lawmakers are trying to tackle potential risks posed by artificial intelligence as chatbots surge in popularity among young people. More than 20 million people use Character.AI every month and users have created millions of chatbots.Lawmakers say the bill could become a national model for AI protections and some of the bill’s supporters include children’s advocacy group Common Sense Media and the American Academy of Pediatrics, California.“Technological innovation is crucial, but our children cannot be used as guinea pigs to test the safety of the products. The stakes are high,” said Sen. Steve Padilla (D-Chula Vista), one of the lawmakers who introduced the bill, at the event attended by Garcia. But tech industry and business groups including TechNet and the California Chamber of Commerce oppose the legislation, telling lawmakers that it would impose “unnecessary and burdensome requirements on general purpose AI models.” The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit digital rights group based in San Francisco, says the legislation raises 1st Amendment issues. “The government likely has a compelling interest in preventing suicide. But this regulation is not narrowly tailored or precise,” EFF wrote to lawmakers.Character.AI has also surfaced 1st Amendment concerns about Garcia’s lawsuit. Its attorneys asked a federal court in January to dismiss the case, stating that a finding in the parents’ favor would violate users’ constitutional right to free speech.Chelsea Harrison, a spokeswoman for Character.AI, said in an email the company takes user safety seriously and its goal is to provide “a space that is engaging and safe.”“We are always working toward achieving that balance, as are many companies using AI across the industry. We welcome working with regulators and lawmakers as they begin to consider legislation for this emerging space,” she said in a statement.She cited new safety features, including a tool that allows parents to see how much time their teens are spending on the platform. The company also cited its efforts to moderate potentially harmful content and direct certain users to the National Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.Social media companies including Snap and Facebook’s parent company Meta have also released AI chatbots within their apps to compete with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which people use to generate text and images. While some users have used ChatGPT to get advice or complete work, some have also turned to these chatbots to play the role of a virtual boyfriend or friend.Lawmakers are also grappling with how to define “companion chatbot.” Certain apps such as Replika and Kindroid market their services as AI companions or digital friends. The bill doesn’t apply to chatbots designed for customer service. Padilla said during the press conference that the legislation focuses on product design that is “inherently dangerous” and is meant to protect minors. More to Read

While studying in Glasgow, my daughter lived in a rented flat with a prepayment electricity meter. Shortly after she moved out in the summer of 2022 she was contacted by ScottishPower about a £1,000 debt.Given it was a pay-as-you-go meter, we questioned how this was possible. But instead of investigating, the debt was passed to a recovery firm, which started chasing her for money in March 2023.The debt collection firm told us the £1,090 debt had built up between December 2017 and July 2022. In 2017, my daughter was still at school and living at home. She only lived in the flat from November 2020 to July 2022.Because she was studying, I offered to sort this out. I went back to ScottishPower to raise a complaint and threatened to contact the Energy Ombudsman. Finally, last July, 16 months later, ScottishPower confirmed there had been an error during an IT upgrade. It said the debt had been recalled and the payment default removed from my daughter’s credit file.I thought that was the end of it until last month when I started getting emails and texts from a different debt collection agency. I contacted ScottishPower but it didn’t respond.Even if I get this new case closed, how can I be sure that the debt has really been cancelled and that any “black marks” have been removed from her credit file?JL, PerthMy goodness, what a saga – and one that is genuinely Kafkaesque, given the flat had a prepayment meter that only allowed her to go £5 into the red.In your full letter you correctly point out that under back billing rules, a supplier cannot charge for energy used more than 12 months ago if you were not correctly billed for it. But along the way there have been numerous red herrings.When I asked ScottishPower to investigate, it confirmed the “debt” was written off last year. The issue resurfaced because it then sold written-off debts to a third party. Your daughter’s account was among them even though her case should have been dealt with as a billing adjustment.ScottishPower has now eventually established that payments made by your daughter and her flatmates were being credited to a closed account in the landlord’s name and this was £106 in credit. It is refunding this sum along with a goodwill gesture of £250.A spokesperson for ScottishPower said: “We have withdrawn all action and apologise for the inconvenience this has caused. We’ve issued a goodwill payment in recognition of the customer’s experience and can confirm there will be no adverse effect on her credit rating.”We welcome letters but cannot answer individually. Email us at consumer.champions@theguardian.com or write to Consumer Champions, Money, the Guardian, 90 York Way, London N1 9GU. Please include a daytime phone number. Submission and publication of all letters is subject to our terms and conditions.

Back in the early months of Covid lockdowns, all the talk in property circles was of would-be housebuyers plotting a move to coastal and rural areas as city dwellers prioritised a bigger garden, access to nature and more room for home working.But, five years on, the reshaping of the housing market sparked by the pandemic has gone into reverse, with homes by the sea seemingly losing some of their lustre and fewer people looking to escape from cities, data shows.The property website Rightmove said that, while much had changed since 2020, one constant was a desire among many would-be buyers for a home with more space.Spool back to early 2020, and among the areas estate agents were naming as the new property hotspots were locations such as Port Isaac in Cornwall, Margate in Kent, Clevedon in north Somerset, the East Neuk of Fife on Scotland’s east coast, and Canford Cliffs, a suburb of Poole in Dorset.Rightmove said that in 2025, “many short-term trends brought about by the unique circumstances of lockdown have reversed”.It added: “Coastal homes are taking longer to find buyers, and price growth has stabilised as more supply has come on to the market – some likely from movers heading back to the city. At the same time, fewer people are looking to escape cities as life has returned to normal and the debate continues about remote versus office working.”Discussions about where you should be allowed to work from have become increasingly heated as a growing number of employers demand that staff attend the workplace more often, which has big implications for where people live.Rightmove said that by March 2021 Cornwall had overtaken London as the most searched-for area on the website for the first time. At the same time, under half (47%) of potential homebuyers in London were looking to stay in the capital, down from 59% a year earlier.Things look very different now: London is once again the most searched-for location on the website, and the majority (58%) of people living there are looking to stay rather than to leave.Homes near the sea are now taking longer to sell compared with the period immediately after the start of the pandemic. In coastal areas, the time it takes to find a buyer has gone up from an average of 52 days then to 73 days now.In addition, house price growth in coastal locations has cooled. Looking at a sample of more than 100 areas, Rightmove found that the average asking price for a home near the sea increased by 4.5% during the first year of the pandemic, well ahead of the average for the country as a whole.But now, the latest average annual increase for coastal areas is 1%, in line with the rest of Britain.A few weeks into the pandemic, the estate agent Savills said the mass switch to working from home had proved that “you don’t need to be in London, or another city, five days a week”.However, research has previously indicated that some who bought during or just after the pandemic later suffered buyer’s remorse: a 2022 survey of those who moved during this period found that 12% believed they rushed into the decision and now regretted it, while a further 15% were not happy and were considering moving again.A separate study last year suggested that some of these movers subsequently sold up and moved back to the suburbs or city.In the immediate wake of the pandemic, many people saw the home working revolution as a potential opportunity to pursue a new or different lifestyle, often away from traditional town and city centres, said Nathan Emerson, the chief executive of the estate agent body Propertymark.But, he added, with lots of employers now wanting their staff to be based in centralised office locations, many people “are choosing metropolitan areas once again, where there are likely better transport links and a more competitive jobs market in many cases”.Rightmove also said that over the past five years, semi-detached and detached houses had seen bigger price rises than flats, suggesting that “there is still a premium for having more space”.Meanwhile, the keywords that buyers have been using in their search for a home – such as “garage” and “annexe” – have largely stayed the same, and relate to having more space.

George Osborne and Ed Balls read out a “misleading” advert for the controversial ticket resale website Viagogo during an episode of their podcast, the advertising regulator has ruled.The two men, who put aside their past rivalry at the dispatch box to launch a podcast in 2023, espoused the benefits of the “secondary” ticketing site in a promotion during an episode broadcast in April last year.Balls, a former Labour shadow chancellor, told listeners that “over half the events listed on Viagogo had tickets selling below face value”.Osborne, a former Conservative chancellor, said: “It sounds like Viagogo might be the solution next time I need cheaper tickets to the hottest shows in town.”Viagogo and rivals such as StubHub allow professional “traders” – defined as those selling more than 100 tickets a year – to make huge profits by hoovering up seats at gigs by acts such as Oasis and Ed Sheeran and selling them on for massive mark-ups.View image in fullscreenThe government is considering banning for-profit resale, following repeated claims that fans are being exploited.On Wednesday, the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) said that Viagogo, which has previously been hit with a court order from the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) for flouting consumer laws, had misled the public with its claim about the volume of events for which tickets were sold below face value. It said the promotion breached the advertising code and should not appear again.The script of the advert was based on Viagogo’s internal calculation that 53% of concert listings on the site included at least one ticket listed at below face value. The ASA said fans would have understood the claim to mean more than one lower-priced ticket was available for those events.It said: “One ticket per event was not a significant proportion of tickets and, as such, did not represent a reasonable chance for consumers to purchase tickets below face value … we considered that the claim, as it would be understood by consumers, had not been substantiated and was therefore misleading.”It also took issue with the definition of face value that Viagogo applied, which included the application of 20% extra for fees, which it said differed from the one widely understood by consumers and also the definition the company used on its own website.The music industry group FanFair Alliance, which campaigns against for-profit resale and touting, submitted the initial complaint to the ASA. It said Viagogo’s claim was “laughable”.A FanFair spokesperson said: “According to a report by the CMA, 80-100% of the tickets sold through Viagogo in 2019 were priced at more than 20% above face value. It is a website dependent upon large-scale ticket touts.”A Viagogo spokesperson said: “The advertisement in question is from last year, has been discontinued and has not aired since then.” They added that Viagogo was “fully compliant in the UK”.The podcasting firm Acast is responsible for adverts on the Political Currency show hosted by Osborne and Balls, according to Persephonica, which makes the programme.The Guardian has approached Acast for comment.

Tesla shares took a hit Monday after a leading analyst slashed his price target by more than 40%, citing a “perfect storm” created by President Trump’s auto tariffs and Elon Musk’s deteriorating reputation.Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives cut his price target from $550 to $315 over the weekend while maintaining his “outperform” rating of the stock. Shares dipped as low as $216 Monday morning, a more than 9% drop. They closed at $233.29 Monday afternoon, down 2.5% for the day. U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick urged Fox News viewers to buy Tesla shares last month, declaring that the shares would “never be this cheap again” when they closed at $235.86 on March 19. The next day, Musk encouraged Tesla employees to “hang on” to their stock at an all-hands meeting. Shares have plunged nearly 40% since the beginning of the year and have fallen 55% from a record high in December. The stock soared with Trump’s victory over Kamala Harris in November’s presidential election, as many believed Musk’s association with the president-elect would bolster Tesla’s value.However, Musk’s controversial role in the Trump administration has created a “brand crisis” for his electric vehicle company, Ives said. Some Tesla owners once drawn to the vehicle’s environmental benefits have since denounced Musk, who runs a White House advisory team he calls the Department of Government Efficiency. Opponents of Trump and Musk have organized anti-Tesla protests and have even vandalized or destroyed Tesla vehicles and charging stations. “The more Musk is attached to the Trump administration and DOGE, the brand damage goes from containable to permanent,” Ives said in an interview. “Tesla has become a political symbol around the world and that’s not a good thing.”Tesla, which is based in Austin, Texas, but has a significant manufacturing plant in Fremont, Calif., has lost about 10% of its future customer base globally, Ives predicted, because of brand issues “self-inflicted by Musk.” The company’s reputation is under fire in China, where consumers are reacting to Trump’s tariff policies, Ives said. A Tesla representative could not be immediately reached for comment.Trump’s auto tariffs will upend supply chains and drive up the price of vehicles and parts, which could further hurt Tesla’s sales. While Tesla is less exposed to tariffs than other U.S. automakers such as Ford and Stellantis, Ives said, the company still sources several parts and batteries from outside the country. Tesla delivered 336,681 vehicles in the first quarter, the company announced this month, well below original industry estimates of 400,000. Ives remains optimistic about the company’s plans for autonomous driving technology and a robotaxi service, he said. Tech stocks have also taken a big hit since Trump unveiled new tariffs, underscoring unease among investors. Last week, analysts said the price of Apple’s iPhone could cost $2,500 more depending on the model. Since April 2, when Trump announced new tariffs, Apple’s stock price has plunged roughly 19 %.Tariffs could also make it more expensive to build data centers and affect companies such as Meta that make money from advertisers in China.Stock prices swung up and down amid rumors that Trump could pause the tariffs for 90 days, but the White House refuted the claim on social media. On Monday, Apple’s stock closed at $181.46, down 3.6%. Other tech companies including Google parent company Alphabet, Nvidia and Amazon saw their share prices rise slightly. Meta, which released its latest artificial intelligence model over the weekend, closed up 2.3% at $516.25. More to Read