Sam Altman Would Like to Change the Subject
The day reporters published a 1.5-year investigation into Sam Altman’s honesty, his company, OpenAI, published a manifesto about saving the world. Here's what that tells us.
It’s a tried-and-true tactic of any student who has finally been discovered selling cigarettes in the bathroom or flushing fireworks down the toilet: as they close in on you, pull the fire alarm. And on Monday, that’s what OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman seems to have done.
OpenAI released a 13-page document entitled “Industrial Policy for the Intelligence Age: Ideas to Keep People First.” It proposed, among other things, a national wealth fund that would give every American a direct stake in AI-driven economic growth, automatic triggers for expanded safety-net benefits when AI displaces enough workers, and a shift in the tax base away from labor and toward capital — including higher taxes on capital gains. Big ideas. Probably already in the works for a while. The kind that get you a friendly half-hour with Axios and a headline comparing you favorably to Franklin Roosevelt.
But why publish Monday? Well, maybe because that same day, The New Yorker published a deep and embarrassing investigation into Altman’s 2023 dismissal from OpenAI, his personal and professional reputation for dishonesty, and the power he is amassing. The year-and-a-half-long investigation by Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz assembles the most detailed public account yet of why Altman’s own board fired him just as OpenAI was reaching escape velocity — and why the people closest to him, including researchers who helped build the most powerful AI company in the world, concluded he could not be trusted with it.
The investigation answered questions that folks in my industry have held since November 2023, when Altman was dismissed. That news was a shock to all of us covering the industry. At the time, reporters like me scrambled for some sense of what he’d done wrong. Because it had to have been awful. Maybe even criminal. I worked through the weekend, I remember, reaching out to board members and insiders, as did everyone else on my beat, because honestly, what the fuck?
After all, by November 2023, Altman had turned OpenAI — a research nonprofit — into the hottest company in tech. ChatGPT, which launched a year earlier, had reached 100 million users faster than any product in history. OpenAI was already valued at around $86 billion. And Altman had just returned from a global tour — meeting heads of state, testifying before Congress as the de facto voice of the AI industry, and positioning himself as the responsible adult in a field full of cowboys. He’d done a world tour hitting something like 22 countries in a matter of months, building OpenAI’s profile as a geopolitical force. He was widely regarded as not just the CEO of a hot startup but as the central figure in what many people were calling the most important technological development in human history. The guy was the face of AI.
According to The New Yorker, LinkedIn co-founder and OpenAI investor Reid Hoffman was as mystified as the rest of us were that weekend.
“I didn’t know what the fuck was going on,” Hoffman told Farrow and Marantz. “We were looking for embezzlement, or sexual harassment, and I just found nothing.”
In the end, reporters only had the board’s language in a vague statement: Altman, they wrote, “was not consistently candid in his communications.”
His firing lasted only 72 hours. His deep bench of financial backers and allies — not least Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, who had already sunk billions into the company — reportedly applied the pressure necessary to get him reinstated. Most of the board that fired him was replaced.
Altman considered many public settings for his recuperative appearances, including NBC, where I worked at the time. His earliest substantive public comments were at a TIME event in December 2023, where he called the experience “extremely painful” but said he thought it had been “great for OpenAI” — and that the company had “never been more unified.” He framed it as almost inevitable, part of a grand plan: “We always said that some moment like this would come. I didn’t think it was going to come so soon, but I think we are stronger for having gone through it.”
Now we finally get something deeper.
