officiant
eroded
mounting concerns
prompted
eject
helm
ouster
outright
acumen
balking
adjunct
OpenAI’s Path Ahead Is Unclear as Employees Threaten to Quit Unless Board Resigns
More than 700 workers, including a board member, demand the reinstatement of ousted CEO Sam Altman
The future of OpenAI was in jeopardy Monday, as the vast majority of employees threatened to quit if the board that fired the company’s CEO, Sam Altman, didn’t resign itself and restore him to power.
CEO Satya Nadella said late Sunday that the company was hiring Altman and Greg Brockman, OpenAI’s president who resigned in protest after Altman was ousted, and was opening its doors to more joining from the company behind viral chatbot ChatGPT.Some top investors were still pushing to reinstate Altman to his CEO role as of Monday, according to a person familiar with the matter. In interviews later in the day, Nadella left open the possibility that Altman could return to OpenAI in his former role, adding that his goal is to work with Altman in either scenario.
More than 700 employees of the artificial-intelligence startup have threatened to leave the company, in a letter to the board of directors. OpenAI currently has about 770 workers.
One surprise signee was Ilya Sutskever, the company’s chief scientist and one of the members of the four-person board that voted to oust Altman. On Monday morning, Sutskever said he deeply regretted his participation in the board’s action. “I will do everything I can to reunite the company,” he posted on X.
Sutskever flipped his position following intense deliberations with OpenAI employees as well as an emotionally charged conversation with Brockman’s wife, Anna Brockman, at the company’s offices, during which she cried and pleaded with him to change his mind, according to people familiar with the matter.
Sutskever arrived at OpenAI’s headquarters Sunday night with Emmett Shear, the former Twitch Chief Executive handpicked by the board to be interim CEO of OpenAI, people familiar with the matter said. Shear was there to meet employees who were gathered there Sunday night but few people showed up, the people said.
It isn’t clear what else influenced Sutskever’s decision to reverse course. Sutskever was the officiant at the Brockmans’ wedding in 2019.
OpenAI is governed by a nonprofit with a board devoted to advancing artificial intelligence for humanity’s benefit over profits. By that measure, the board acted as it was designed and ethically obliged to do, people familiar with the board’s thinking said.
One factor driving the board’s decision last week was the members’ lack of clarity around Altman’s pursuits outside of OpenAI, the people said. The trust between Altman and the board had eroded so much that there were mounting concerns that OpenAI’s intellectual property or technology could be used in ways that made the board uncomfortable, the people said. Further details couldn’t be learned.
Over the weekend, OpenAI’s senior leadership repeatedly asked the board to explain what prompted their apparently sudden decision to eject Altman. In the employee letter made public Monday, OpenAI’s leaders said the board failed to give them an explanation.
“You also informed the leadership team that allowing the company to be destroyed ‘would be consistent with the mission,’” the letter said.
In a message to employees Sunday night, the board reaffirmed its decision; it provided few new details. It said the decision was “not about product safety or security, the pace of development or OpenAI’s finances. This was not about any singular incident,” according to the message, which was viewed by The Wall Street Journal.
“We know that removing someone with Sam’s high profile in our industry comes as a shock, but he lost the trust of the board of directors,” the message said.
In the months leading up to his dismissal, Altman had been spending more time exploring two new business endeavors. The first was a new consumer hardware device that he would create with
’s former chief design officer, Jony Ive. The second was a new startup that created low-cost chips that OpenAI could use to train its AI models. Altman had spent weeks in the Middle East trying to raise money for this second endeavor.
This also isn’t the first time Altman has been asked to depart a company. A few years ago, senior leaders at Y Combinator, the venture firm Altman used to run, also asked Altman to leave his role as president following mounting concerns about the time he was spending on other business endeavors, including at OpenAI.
Nadella said late Sunday that Altman and Brockman would be joining the company to helm a new advanced artificial-intelligence research team. The move came after Altman’s bid to return to the company he co-founded fell apart, with the board that fired him declining to agree to the proposed terms of his reinstatement.
The employees said in their letter that they might leave the company and join Altman and Brockman at Microsoft if their demands aren’t met, adding that Microsoft had assured them that there would be jobs available for all of them. Microsoft has invested $13 billion in OpenAI.
Microsoft, which owns about 49% of OpenAI and has no control over its governance, is already putting the structure in place to take on existing OpenAI employees in a new organization. The division underneath Altman and Brockman will report directly to Microsoft’s chief technology officer, Kevin Scott, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Shares of Microsoft dropped Friday amid the initial chaos following Altman’s ouster. They reversed course Monday after Nadella’s announcement, reaching a record high as investors cheered the possibility that Microsoft could end up owning the talent and technology behind ChatGPT outright.
Before the drama of the past few days, OpenAI had been in talks to complete a sale of employee shares with outside investors that would have roughly tripled the stock’s value to almost $90 billion from earlier this year.
Despite the company’s nonprofit roots, many OpenAI employees are Silicon Valley engineers and researchers who stood to benefit from the vast financial upside offered by working at a startup, and some negotiated salaries in the millions of dollars. That upside could be vastly diminished should they work for Microsoft.
The abrupt firing of Altman has paused the share sale, which was first reported by the Journal in September. Many investors purchasing the shares from employees were attracted to Altman’s business acumen and vision, and are balking at investing more in OpenAI without him at the helm. Earlier in the year, investors including Thrive Capital and Founders Fund had purchased shares at a valuation of a little under $30 billion.
On Monday morning, Sutskever posted on X trying to repair the damage.
“I deeply regret my participation in the board’s actions,” he wrote. “I never intended to harm OpenAI. I love everything we’ve built together and I will do everything I can to reunite the company.”
In addition to Sutskever, OpenAI’s board consists of Adam D’Angelo, a former Facebook executive and the founder of the question-and-answer website Quora; Tasha McCauley, an adjunct senior management scientist at Rand, and Helen Toner, a director at a Washington nonprofit.
Tom Dotan contributed to this article.
Write to Deepa Seetharaman at deepa.seetharaman@wsj.com, Berber Jin at berber.jin@wsj.com and Keach Hagey at Keach.Hagey@wsj.com
