This is hilarious. Reminds me of the commandments revisions in animal farm.

No animal shall sleep in a bed. Revision: No animal shall sleep in a bed with sheets.

No animal shall drink alcohol. Revision: No animal shall drink alcohol to excess.

No animal shall kill any other animal. Revision: No animal shall kill any other animal without cause.

All animals are equal. Revision: All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.

Thank you for actually extracting the historical mission statement changes! Also I love that you/Claude were able to back-date the gist to just use the change logs to represent time.

re: the article, it's worth noting OAI's 2021 statement just included '...that benefits humanity', and in 2022 'safely' was first added so it became '...that safely benefits humanity'. And then the most recent statement was entirely re-written to be much shorter, and no longer includes the word 'safely'.

Other words also removed from the statement:

   responsibly
   unconstrained
   safe
   positive
   ensuring
   technology
   world
   profound, etc, etc

> I went through and extracted that mission statement for 2016 through 2024, then had Claude Code help me fake the commit dates to turn it into a git repository and share that as a Gist—which means that Gist’s revisions page shows every edit they’ve made since they started filing their taxes!

Instantly fed to CC to script out, this is awesome.

It seems like a lot of punctuation was removed in those gist extracts?

This writeup is very useful simonw.

But the title of this HN post is extremely misleading. What happened is that OpenAI rewrote the mission statement, reducing it from 63 words to 13. One of the 50 words they deleted happens to be "safely".

This is fascinating. Does something like this exist for Anthropic? I'm suddenly very curious about consistency/adaptation in AI lab missions.

- don't be evil

+ ¯\_(ツ)_/¯