AI is a topic on everyone’s mind. We continually hear from the big AI companies that their technology has already changed the world, and is poised to cause tremendous changes in the future. Everyone is talking about AI.

We have reached out to people at some of the major AI companies in the list below, asking them to speak at this year’s HOPE conference to start an open dialog about AI. Yet, in every case, when the representatives of the AI companies learned that their talk would not be allowed to be a mere unchallenged sales pitch, they became significantly less interested. And when they learned we would allow— and encourage— audience members to ask questions, the representatives stopped responding to us altogether. This happened with each and every company.

If AI is going to change the world, we believe the public should have some input. But the major AI players are all closed systems run by billionaires (and now a trillionaire) who control politicians and are allergic to democratic processes that include asking hard questions— or any questions at all. If these systems are so powerfully going to change our lives, shouldn’t our voices be taken seriously? Surely we deserve more than a choice between RoboCop and Brazil.

At HOPE we want an open conversation, an open exchange of ideas about this powerful new technology.

We welcome AI companies to present at HOPE and be part of the community, not merely on their terms, but in shared agreement with those of us set to be greatly effected by their systems, technologies, and products.

They claim to be open to scrutiny, but so far, even those that use the word “open” in their name appear through their actions to be anything but. Please consider this to be a public invitation to them to let hackers help improve the technology as well as to make the world a better place. We promise we won’t bite— but we will ask questions.

This invitation is hereby extended to any company involved in AI, including but not limited to:

OpenAI (ChatGPT)
Anthropic (Claude)
Meta (Meta AI)
Google (Gemini)
Microsoft (Copilot)
X/Twitter (Grok)
Nvidia (Nemotron)