Protesters gather at OpenAI’s DevDay

The protest at DevDay is more than a PR headache for OpenAI—it's a collision between two competing narratives. On one side, OpenAI has positioned itself as the safety-conscious lab, the one that broke from the pack to promise human-aligned AGI. On the other, the demonstrators chanting "Sam Altman, get off it, put people over profit" are telling a different story: one of a company whose institutional decisions—not its mission statements—are what define its character. The source article (https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/1002201/openai-sam-altman-openai-devday-protests-ice-data-centers) makes clear this was a coordinated, multi-organizational effort, not a handful of lone hecklers. The chant's simplicity is deceptive. "People over profit" sounds like generic anti-corporate boilerplate, but the specifics behind it are concrete. The rally's focus on ICE and data centers points to the two most tangible flashpoints in the AI accountability debate: the entanglement of AI systems with surveillance and immigration enforcement, and the staggering resource demands of the infrastructure layer—electricity, water, land—that land hardest on surrounding communities. These aren't abstract philosophical objections to AGI; they're grievances about