New details suggest that Sam Altman used his power to manipulate employees and board members at OpenAI. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
- More details about Sam Altman's fall from OpenAI have emerged.
- New reports suggest Altman may have been a manipulative leader at times.
- According to the reports, Altman pitted board members and employees against each other to stay in power.
In the days following Sam Altman's departure from OpenAI on November 17, company employees and several members of the broader tech community likened the move to a coup.
Immediately after his firing, it was said that broad circles within OpenAI liked Altman and that his sudden dismissal was shocking – an erratic move by a board that put ideology above the demands of its stakeholders and the wishes of its employees.
But in recent weeks, new details have emerged that shed more light on the board's decision — which was ultimately reversed in a detour — to fire Altman.
These new details suggest that Altman is a skilled corporate schemer who manipulated people and perceptions within OpenAI to maintain his own reputation, and that his tactics misled more than a few people in the organization.
Altman vs. Toner
When OpenAI's board first announced Altman's firing on November 17, it offered no significant explanation other than to say that Altman had “not been consistently open in his communications with the board.”
However, new reports suggest that the board may have been referring to instances in which Altman pitted board members against each other – particularly those who disagreed with his aggressive approach to adopting AI technology. Since its founding, there have been tensions at OpenAI over how cautiously it should proceed given the potential threat the technology poses to humanity.
Altman, for example, didn't always see eye to eye with board member Helen Toner.
In October, Toner, a researcher who works at a think tank at Georgetown University, published an article in which he not only praised OpenAI's rival Anthropic for delaying the release of its chatbot Claude, but also criticized the company's “hectic cutting corners” release ChatGPT.
According to the New York Times, Altman called Toner about the paper, saying it could “cause problems” with the Federal Trade Commission, which was already investigating OpenAI.
Toner offered to write an apology to OpenAI's board, but Altman himself later emailed OpenAI executives telling them he had made allegations against Toner, the Times reported. “I didn’t feel like we saw eye to eye on the harm all of this was causing,” he wrote in that email, according to the Times.
Their clash may have resulted in Altman sowing tensions between Toner and another board member, Tasha McCauley.
Altman called other members of the OpenAI board and told them that McCauley — a technology entrepreneur and scientist at the RAND Corporation — wanted to remove Toner from the board, people with knowledge of the discussions told the Times. McCauley later said this was “absolutely false” when board members asked her about the incident.
Altman vs. Sutskever
Altman and OpenAI's chief scientist (and former board member) Ilya Sutskever also had a strained relationship. Their differences were entirely ideological.
Sutskever was considered an AI “visionary” within OpenAI with an academic approach that didn't necessarily sit well with an engineer like Altman, people familiar with the situation previously told Business Insider. He worried that Altman would push OpenAI to develop the technology too quickly and wanted to take a more cautious approach.
Over time, Sutskever also became frustrated with being “pushed out of decisions about ChatGPT-5” and plans to scale the product and the company, sources previously told Business Insider.
According to the Times, tensions reached a peak in October when Altman promoted a researcher to the same level as Sutskever. Sutskever perceived this as a snub to his own standing in the company and told other board members in protest that he might resign, which they saw as an invitation to choose between Sutskever and Altman, the Times reported.
Altman against everyone else
Some of the six board members at the time found Altman to be insincere and a little too calculating. Several of them had backgrounds in nonprofits or academia, and they didn't necessarily like Altman's “move fast and break things” approach to tech executives, according to the New Yorker.
“They felt like Sam was lying,” a person familiar with the board discussions told the New Yorker. They feared Altman's tactics so much that when they began talking about his removal, they were careful to make sure it would be a surprise, The New Yorker reported. “It was clear that once Sam knew, he would do anything to undermine the board,” a person familiar with their discussions told the outlet.
In a meeting with OpenAI employees two nights after Altman's ouster, Sutskever said that an explanation he received from the board for Altman's firing was that Altman had given two board members two different opinions about a member within the organization, as stated with Sources familiar with the meeting previously told Business Insider. The other explanation Sutskever offered was that Altman had reportedly given the same project to two different people in the organization.
Altman himself has not denied that he had problems with the board before his expulsion. “It is clear that there were real misunderstandings between me and the board members,” he said wrote on X, a little less than two weeks after his removal from power.
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Altman has not publicly responded to allegations that he is difficult to work with, but in an interview with Trevor Noah last week he acknowledged that more voices on AI safety are needed on the board. “I’m excited to get a second chance to do all of these things right. And we’ve clearly done them wrong before,” he told Noah.
That Altman's fall was so brief suggested that he had the support of the entire organization. It sparked a wave of heart emojis on social media from OpenAI executives and a letter of support from employees in which he threatened to quit if he wasn't rehired. However, not everyone in the company supported Altman.
According to the Washington Post, a handful of senior OpenAI executives came to the board in the fall with complaints about Altman. They suggested that Altman could disrupt workflow at OpenAI, and some — including those who lead large teams — said Altman would pit employees against each other in problematic ways, the Post reported.
The comments prompted the board to review Altman's conduct as CEO. An employee told the board that Altman became “hostile” after the employee gave him critical feedback. Altman then undermined a member of that team, the source told the Post.
The fact that Altman was so quickly reinstated as CEO suggests that none of these allegations satisfied the company's powerful backers like Microsoft. Sutskever has also expressed regret for his actions. Still, the word on the street is that Altman may have gotten the message that it's time to reshape his image.
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