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Moves like this should be illegal. It's becoming increasingly clear that OpenAI is going to get lapped by Google on technical merits. So this is the "code red"

• nextworddev 10mo ago
  [flagged]
  • nextworddev 10mo ago
    [flagged]
• imbusy111 10mo ago
  Seems like it is, but the question is whether the current Justice Department will do anything about it.
  • semiquaver 10mo ago
    > Seems like it is Do you have a citation for what law is being violated? Or just vibes?
    • ajross 10mo ago
      Market manipulation is a crime under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. You can't buy things to influence the price or the market, only to use or resell. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_manipulation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_manipulation
      • dmix 10mo ago
        That'd probably make more sense if there wasn't also 50 other tech companies buying up RAM for the same reason (a sudden huge spike in demand due to AI taking off).
        • ajross 10mo ago
          It's about volume, not a naive count of consumers. Article claims that OpenAI holds contracts for 40% of world DRAM production. That's just really obviously manipulation if they can't actually power those chips, come on.
          • dmix 10mo ago
            So the prosecution will gamble that OpenAI won't in fact use the RAM in a relevant timeframe and they only bought them to exclude the other swath of AI companies from competing? From the article > OpenAI isn’t even bothering to buy finished memory modules! No, their deals are unprecedentedly only for raw wafers — uncut, unfinished, and not even allocated to a specific DRAM standard yet. It’s not even clear if they have decided yet on how or when they will finish them into RAM sticks or HBM! Right now it seems like these wafers will just be stockpiled in warehouses – like a kid who hides the toybox because they’re afraid nobody wants to play with them, and thus selfishly feels nobody but them should get the toys! I guess we'll have to see if they in fact just keep "unfinished" RAM in warehouses like the article says and not roll them out into datacenters for a legitimate use as they are finished.
        • zamalek 10mo ago
          They mean to resell them in a different form: as part of their PaaS or SaaS. Per the article, OpenAI is just hoarding the wafers, not purchasing the final product.
        • deleted 10mo ago
          [deleted]
      • armaautomotive 10mo ago
        Do you think OpenAI plans to trade the semiconductor market? This would only apply in that scenario.
        • ajross 10mo ago
          No, they want DRAM to be expensive to give them a competitive advantage over their competitors.
        • nerdponx 10mo ago
          It's interesting that this isn't actually illegal to do except in the specific context of an exchange market. I did a very cursory search of the US Code and the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 and yeah, unless there's some additional legal precedent or other applicable law I didn't find, then this might just be a gap in the law. It even seems to skirt around notions of illegal vertical integration. For example in this address from 1998, a former FTC commissioner describes several types of illegal "vertical alliances", all of which rely on both the upstream supplier and the downstream consumer being aligned in anticompetitive intent, which (if the article is to be believed) they couldn't have been here because there are two suppliers who were unaware of each other's deals. Is it really not illegal to just buy up a huge chunk of a critical input for an industry and stockpile it for the purpose of locking out competitors? Seems hard to imagine that some robber baron of the 19th century didn't already do this.
          • butvacuum 10mo ago
            Let's not forget that if it's not illegal now, it could be illegal in a matter of days. Add 12 if a president decides to sit on their thumbs, it's happened before.
          • zozbot234 10mo ago
            > Seems hard to imagine that some robber baron of the 19th century didn't already do this. They tried it and lost their shirts. When you hoard a critical input, that input doesn't just disappear. You spend huge amounts of money pushing the price up, and then the market price turns against you as people finally figure out that the hoarding was just a stunt, that you don't really have a higher-valued use for the stuff you hoarded, and all of it is going to be right back on the market sooner or later.
      • semiquaver 10mo ago
        The law you refer to applies only to markets for securities. RAM is very clearly not a security, it fails the Howey test. There are similar laws prohibiting the manipulation of commodity markets but I do not believe a US court would find RAM to be a commodity.
        • jordanb 10mo ago
          How is RAM not a commodity?
          • butvacuum 10mo ago
            It doesn't really matter, because the first question is: can the government suspend the contract (injunction?) while this is sorted out. There's also the question of if OpenAI operated In good Faith (from a search: "Another sign of bad faith is withholding crucial information..."), and- of course- the South Korean government can step in as well. In fact- as a worldwide issue- any sufficiently large State(or group of States) can take issue with it. OpenAI will have issues if they find themselves unable to buy power equipment (Schnider, Eaton). Or, perhaps anybody associated with OpenAI management or funding is arrested the second they step foot in Europe. This is already a nightmare of an International Incident.
          • baking 10mo ago
            It may be a commodity, but there is no established commodity market for RAM in the US, as there is for energy and agricultural products. The laws relate to the manipulation of a commodity market. Commodity markets are usually established where the products are produced, not where they are consumed.
      • theturtle 10mo ago
        [dead]
    • intunderflow 10mo ago
      https://fortune.com/2025/11/23/ai-rivals-like-openai-nvidia-and-oracle-are-collaborating-to-build-stargate-but-a-yale-expert-says-it-violates-135-years-of-antitrust-law/ https://fortune.com/2025/11/23/ai-rivals-like-openai-nvidia-... Obviously kind of a moot point because whether it violates antitrust law or not, what is guaranteed is the US Government is not going to do anything
      • semiquaver 10mo ago
        Whether the Clayton and Sherman acts apply to the Stargate initiative is not relevant to this RAM-hoarding activity.
    • themafia 10mo ago
      It's possible this could be construed as price fixing. If the DOJ cared it could open an investigation, leading to a suit, leading to discovery of communications between Altman and all the other relevant players. If price manipulation is an apparent factor in their decision making it may be a very easy case.
    • fatata123 10mo ago
      [dead]
  • UncleOxidant 10mo ago
    The current Justice Department? You're kidding, right?
    • blibble 10mo ago
      Google just need to give the US regime a solid gold award for what? unimportant
  • willis936 10mo ago
    I read "US Justice Department" the same way I read "Britain's Ministry of Truth".
    • paulryanrogers 10mo ago
      When I hear about this US justice department, I hear the mafia enforcement.
      • themafia 10mo ago
        It has been since forever. There was a reason J. Edgar Hoover denied the existence of organized crime for decades.
• loeg 10mo ago
  > Moves like this should be illegal. Should be, as in, new legislation should criminalize it? What's the generalized principle? Or should be, as in existing law should cover it? And if so, what law / how?
  • adgjlsfhk1 10mo ago
    It wouldn't shock me if this is actually just market manipulation. OpenAI in the past year seems to be operating more and more like a pump and dump machine. Their recent AMD deal seems to have been AMD giving them a bunch of stock for free in exchange for them announcing that they would use AMD GPUs for training, and OpenAI doesn't have any fab equipment so the only thing they can do with 40% of the global dram supply is sell it to someone else.
    • wmf 10mo ago
      the only thing they can do with 40% of the global dram supply is sell it to someone else. The way it works is that OpenAI will have the DRAM delivered to Nvidia/AMD/Broadcom to be assembled into the racks that OpenAI buys.
    • astral_drama 10mo ago
      It's market manipulation. You get a chase going (panic buying) by those that are short (need to buy memory in the future). Run up the price on those shorts and squeeze them out as they chase price higher, meanwhile you bought in low and can distribute out your supply when you see fit, or run it up higher until everyone is wrecked. If I were the memory makers I wouldn't want to cede control to openai, you'd rather have a healthy, steady ecosystem than a rigged market that people don't want to be involved in.
  • daemonologist 10mo ago
    Should be investigated as anticompetitive behavior under the FTC Act. Of course that's unlikely to happen. Maybe also market manipulation under the Commodity Exchange Act.
  • thefz 10mo ago
• roenxi 10mo ago
  As in producers not over-producing RAM should be illegal? A presumably short-term price spike in RAM of all things is a non-issue. It is a luxury good that only a very small number of people care about and there is no reason to think this blip is going to last. Apple did stuff like this all the time at their high point in the late 2000s and early 2010s, and it would happen often in other markets. The world is not static and sometimes the situation changes and lots of supply is soaked up.
  • michaelmrose 10mo ago
    Who in developed countries doesn't buy computers and by extension ram
    • roenxi 10mo ago
      Who in the developed world doesn't have a few luxuries? Pretty much all of history people have had to make do with RAM being a lot less accessible than it is now. It isn't essential and people can still buy RAM in the rare situations where they actually need it. There is nothing here worth invoking the legal system over. OpenAI can buy huge amounts of RAM if they want. Good luck to them, hope it works out, looks like an expensive and risky manoeuvre. And we're probably going to have a RAM glut in a few years looking at these prices.
      • harimau777 10mo ago
        I don't follow how computers are not essential.
      • AlotOfReading 10mo ago
        DRAM is one of the categories of advanced semiconductors that the US considers important enough to national security that exporting it to China is forbidden. It's a fundamental industrial product.
        • roenxi 10mo ago
          Yeah. Companies like OpenAI need a lot of RAM. That is why they just bought up what is apparently a material chunk of the market. There is a certain level of crazy that crowds can find when people identify something as a fundamental industrial product critical to national security and simultaneously someone is calling for companies buying a lot of it [0] to be made illegal. If something is critically important to industry then companies should be encouraged to dump as much money as they like in the sector. Otherwise industry will suffer. [0] And OpenAI is probably going to turn out to be closely associated with US national security too.
• Libidinalecon 10mo ago
  This is a desperate move by a company that is in huge trouble. I paid almost every month since gpt4 came out but mine lapsed when Gemini was released and I haven't even thought of logging in. The subscribers are exactly the users who would migrate to Gemini. Then your left with the prospect of this giant free chatgpt user base setting money fire. Wouldn't be shocking at all looking back 10 years from now that maybe the path that Altman stays fired would have been the better path.
• tarsinge 10mo ago
  What are the chances the deal doesn’t go through because OpenAI fails to find enough money? Between Google, other labs and China the risk of commoditization is climbing and so why would investors continue to throw money at them? Kind of the same problem people are starting to bring up regarding Nvidia order book no? Do SoftBank and Oracle have $500B in cash to go through, or does it count on new investors coming in to not implode? Edit: From the Stargate page on Wikipedia it seems indeed there is a big uncertainty regarding financing: > On August 7, 2025, Bloomberg reported that the project had not started and no funds were raised to meet the project's initial $500 billion budget. Market uncertainty, American trade policy, and AI hardware valuations caused the delay according to a Bloomberg News report
• Xmd5a 10mo ago
  Last time I used OpenAI computer-use agent (Atlas iirc), I asked it to go on vast.ai and configure an instance template for me. It gave me back control to input my username and password, but alas, since I had used my google account to sign in, I had to go through Google login portal, which put an end to my experiment since it deemed the agent's browser wasn't trustworthy. Mmmh.