OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said Wednesday that the company is “not the elected moral police of the world” after receiving backlash over his decision to loosen restrictions and allow content like erotica within its chatbot ChatGPT.

The artificial intelligence startup has expanded its safety controls in recent months as it faced mounting scrutiny over how it protects users, particularly minors.

But Altman said Tuesday in a post on X that OpenAI will be able to “safely relax” most restrictions now that it has new tools and has been able to mitigate “serious mental health issues.”

In December, Altman said it will allow more content, including erotica, on ChatGPT for “verified adults.”

Altman tried to clarify the move in a post on X on Wednesday, saying OpenAI cares “very much about the principle of treating adult users like adults,” but it will still not allow “things that cause harm to others.”

“In the same way that society differentiates other appropriate boundaries (R-rated movies, for example) we want to do a similar thing here,” Altman wrote.

The Federal Trade Commission launched an inquiry into OpenAI and other tech companies in September over how chatbots like ChatGPT could negatively affect children and teenagers. OpenAI is also named in a wrongful death lawsuit with a family who blamed ChatGPT for their teenage son’s death by suicide.

In the months following the inquiry and the lawsuit, OpenAI has taken several public steps to enhance safety on ChatGPT.

The company announced on Tuesday that it has assembled a council of eight experts who will provide insight into how AI impacts users’ mental health, emotions and motivation.

OpenAI also launched a series of parental controls late last month, and it is building an age prediction system that will automatically apply teen-appropriate settings for users under 18.

As a result, Altman’s post about loosening restrictions on Tuesday sparked confusion and swift backlash on social media. He said it “blew up” much more than he was expecting.

Altman’s post also caught the attention of advocacy groups like the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, which called on OpenAI to reverse its decision to allow erotica on ChatGPT.

“Sexualized AI chatbots are inherently risky, generating real mental health harms from synthetic intimacy; all in the context of poorly defined industry safety standards,” Haley McNamara, NCOSE’s executive director, said in a statement on Wednesday.

If you are having suicidal thoughts or are in distress, contact the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988 for support and assistance from a trained counselor

WATCH: AI is not in a bubble, valuations look ‘pretty reasonable’, says BlackRock

As artificial intelligence startups raise increasingly large sums of cash to fund their swelling infrastructure needs, they’re turning to strategic partners like Nvidia and big venture firms such as Thrive Capital, Sequoia and Andreessen Horowitz.

But one major financier has a name that’s less familiar in the world of tech investing: MGX.

Backed by Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund and launched in March 2024, MGX has emerged as a key source of capital as hyperscalers Microsoft, Meta and Google, and startups like OpenAI race to build out the enormous computing power needed to meet expected AI demand.

In September, MGX made another big splash, joining Oracle and Silver Lake in President Donald Trump‘s push to get TikTok under U.S. control.

And on Wednesday, MGX was back in the news as part of another giant AI deal. MGX is joining investors including Nvidia, Microsoft, BlackRock and Elon Musk’s xAI in purchasing Aligned Data Centers for $40 billion, the largest global data center deal to date. Aligned designs and operates facilities across North and South America.

MGX was formed out of a joint venture between Group 42 (G42), a tech holding company based in the United Arab Emirates, and Mubadala Investment Company. Despite the geopolitical concerns that come with bringing vast amounts of Middle Eastern money into critical U.S. infrastructure, tech companies are welcoming MGX and its deep pockets into the fold.

MGX’s first major announcement in the U.S. landed in the fall of 2024, not quite two years after OpenAI’s ChatGPT set the generative AI boom in motion.

In its initial deal, MGX joined a consortium — now called AI Infrastructure Partnership (AIP) — formed by firms including BlackRock and Microsoft, to spend $100 billion on AI infrastructure, primarily in the U.S. Separately, Microsoft invested $1.5 billion in G42 to develop AI technologies in the Middle East, with G42 using Microsoft’s Azure cloud service to power it all.

The AIP consortium is also MGX’s avenue into the latest deal for Aligned.

MGX has since joined as a partner in Stargate, the $500 billion Trump-endorsed joint venture with OpenAI, Oracle and SoftBank to build AI infrastructure across the U.S. According to PitchBook, MGX has also invested in numerous companies over the past year, including Databricks, Anthropic and xAI. Its chairman is Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the national security advisor of the UAE and a brother of the country’s president.

Certain transactions suggest a level of coziness with Trump.

Earlier this year, MGX reportedly provided $2 billion in funding to the crypto exchange Binance, using a cryptocurrency purchased from the Trump family’s World Liberty Financial. Al Nahyan also visited President Trump in the White House this spring to announce a $1.4 trillion investment in the U.S. over the next decade.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., blasted the arrangement.

“MGX – a shady Abu Dhabi firm – has already cut deals to get sensitive American technology while enriching the Trump family’s crypto firm,” Warren said in a statement last month. “The American people deserve to know if the President has struck another backdoor deal for this billionaire takeover of TikTok.”

Representatives for MGX, OpenAI, Microsoft and BlackRock declined to comment for this story.

Patrick Moorhead, an analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, said tech companies in the U.S. may need to partner with Middle East firms on AI in order to keep them from instead working with our chief international adversary.

“I believe in the Middle East… we either provide the goods or they will go to China,” Moorhead said.

Moorhead added that MGX is following the same playbook as Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund. They’re trying to diversify away from oil, and AI is one area where they can put money to work.

“The amount of capital required is astronomical,” Moorhead said. “And they’re willing to take the risks.”

Even though tech giants like Microsoft, Meta and Amazon have enough cash to fund their AI ambitions, additional resources are always welcome. That’s also why many AI leaders are renting AI capacity from companies like CoreWeave instead of building it all themselves.

“I think they will find real acceptance among VCs because people are comfortable with sovereign wealth,” said Bradley Tusk, a venture capitalist and co-founder of Tusk Capital Partners. “This is a tough fundraising environment, so they’re a potentially good source of capital.”

Tusk warned that MGX could get entangled in U.S. politics and the perception that it’s too close to the Trump administration, which could be problematic if a Democrat is in the White House in the coming years.

“I think the biggest risk is that the only narrative right now is they are Trump’s friends,” Tusk said.

WATCH: Oracle, OpenAI and SoftBank unveil $400 billion Stargate data center expansion.

The era of artificial intelligence on Wall Street, and its impact on workers, has begun.

Big banks including JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs are unveiling plans to reimagine their businesses around AI, technology that allows for the mass production of knowledge work.

That means that even during a blockbuster year for Wall Street as trading and investment banking spins off billions of dollars in excess revenue — not typically a time the industry would be keeping a tight lid on head count — the companies are hiring fewer people.

JPMorgan said Tuesday in its third-quarter earnings report that while profit jumped 12% from a year earlier to $14.4 billion, head count rose by just 1%.

The bank’s managers have been told to avoid hiring people as JPMorgan deploys AI across its businesses, CFO Jeremy Barnum told analysts.

JPMorgan is the world’s biggest bank by market cap and a juggernaut across Main Street and Wall Street finance. Last month, CNBC was first to report about JPMorgan’s plans to inject AI into every client and employee experience and every behind-the-scenes process at the bank.

The bank has “a very strong bias against having the reflexive response to any given need to be to hire more people,” Barnum said Tuesday. JPMorgan had 318,153 employees as of September.

JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon told Bloomberg this month that AI will eliminate some jobs, but that the company will retrain those impacted and that its overall head count could grow.

At rival investment bank Goldman Sachs, CEO David Solomon on Tuesday issued his own vision statement around how the company would reorganize itself around AI. Goldman is coming off a quarter where profit surged 37% to $4.1 billion.

“To fully benefit from the promise of AI, we need greater speed and agility in all facets of our operations,” Solomon told employees in a memo this week.

“This doesn’t just mean re-tooling our platforms,” he said. “It means taking a front-to-back view of how we organize our people, make decisions, and think about productivity and efficiency.”

The upshot for his workers: Goldman would “constrain headcount growth” and lay off a limited number of employees this year, Solomon said.

Goldman’s AI project will take years to implement and will be measured against goals including improving client experiences, higher profitability and productivity, and enriching employee experiences, according to the memo.

Even with these plans, which is first looking at reengineering processes like client onboarding and sales, Goldman’s overall head count is rising this year, according to bank spokeswoman Jennifer Zuccarelli.

The comments around AI from the largest U.S. banks mirror those from tech giants including Amazon and Microsoft, whose leaders have told their workforces to brace for AI-related disruptions, including hiring freezes and layoffs.

Companies across sectors have become more blunt this year about the possible impacts of AI on employees as the technology’s underlying models become more capable and as investors reward businesses seen as ahead on AI.

In banking, the dominant thinking is that workers in operational roles, sometimes referred to as the back and middle office, are generally most exposed to job disruption from AI.

For instance, in May a JPMorgan executive told investors that operations and support staff would fall by at least 10% over the next five years, even while business volumes grew, thanks to AI.

At Goldman Sachs, Solomon seemed to warn the firm’s 48,300 employees that the next few years might be uncomfortable for some.

“We don’t take these decisions lightly, but this process is part of the long-term dynamism our shareholders, clients, and people expect of Goldman Sachs,” he said in the memo. “The firm has always been successful by not just adapting to change, but anticipating and embracing it.”