'Open Letter on Open Letters' Skewers AI Petition Culture

A very short satirical document is circulating this week, taking direct aim at the industry habit of using open letters as a kind of collective lobbying instrument. The piece, titled "Open Letter on Open Letters", opens with the line: "We, the undersigned, are dissatisfied with our place in the world. While employees from frontier labs get to sign an open letter every day, we have never been asked to sign an open letter."

The joke works because the referent is unmistakable. Just this month a letter titled "Open Weights and American AI Leadership," dated July 24, reportedly attracted 25 corporate signatories and then doubled to 50 within a day, according to Tom's Hardware. Days later, Bloomberg reported that more than 1,100 staffers across top AI firms had signed a separate petition asking the US government to help "deliberately pace" AI development. Two campaigns pointing in opposite directions, same format.

The satire declares that its authors "reject all things that should be rejected" and present "a very long list of demands," though no demands actually appear. Nine names sign it, including Tim Kellogg ("an important guy, allegedly"), Erik Istre, Shaughnessy O'Brien, Riley, Claus, Adam, Aadi, Miguel and Brian Ragle, each with a deliberately vague self-descriptor ranging from "a dude that knows nothing" to "just wanted to be part of something." The whole thing takes maybe a minute to read.

The honest caveat is that this is a joke document, not an argument, and the piece itself never names the specific letters it is spoofing; take the target as implied, not stated. What the reporting also doesn't give you is any sense of who organized it or how widely it has traveled. What it captures, though, is a real fatigue building around the form. Signature counts have become a stand-in for consensus, and the marginal open letter now has to work hard to say something the last one didn't. For anyone building or covering AI policy, the more interesting question the parody points at is who is being asked to sign, and who is not.