> are generally understood to have a civic responsibility to make contributions to their local community, above and beyond their tax obligations

Literally what taxes are for. If there are expectations that a company contributes to civic duties then make it a law and apply it equally.

Government should work on what the citizens should need. Having individual companies play it like a marketing game where the loudest voices get appeased is a very bad expectation. Decide what the people need centrally and apply tax dollars collected on a fair basis.

> but if it's true that OpenAI has made "less than a million dollars" in SF civic contributions

If you completely ignore all of the taxes paid by the corporations and their employees and also discount their civic contributions as not counting because the author of the op-ed doesn’t like them and therefore has decided they don’t count.

Even I can see why this game is unwinnable. The person writing this piece doesn’t understand how taxes work or the role of the government. They don’t even have great ideas for what would appease them. They just want to be angry at the current companies in the news and will move on to being angry at a different set of companies when the news cycle shifts in a few years.

Again, what you're saying is not what the social compact has historically been. Most companies, both inside and outside of Silicon Valley, happily recognize their informal responsibilities to the communities where they're located. Our AI overlords certainly have a legal right to skimp on social responsibility, but then they may not like the taxes that we have to enact on them in response.

> Even I can see why this game is unwinnable.

The point is that this is not supposed to be a "game" to win or lose. As a San Francisco business, OpenAI is supposed to care about the health of San Francisco in and of itself, not just doing the minimum to discharge some abstract duty. If San Francisco residents are going around saying "I'm unhappy about OpenAI, they're making my housing cost way too much", there should be a team working on that as passionately as the team working on training the next model.