OpenAI's board fires Sam Altman, and reinstates him five days later

OpenAI’s board announced that Sam Altman was leaving, saying he “was not consistently candid in his communications with the board” and that it no longer had confidence in his leadership. Chairman Greg Brockman was removed from the board and resigned. The statement gave no specifics, and none were subsequently made public in detail.

The reversal took five days. Microsoft, which had invested billions but held no board seat, announced that Altman and Brockman would lead a new advanced research group there. More than 700 of roughly 770 OpenAI employees signed a letter threatening to follow unless the board resigned — among them Ilya Sutskever, the chief scientist and a board member who had participated in the removal and who publicly said he regretted it. Altman returned as chief executive five days later under an initial reconstituted board, with the fuller board announced on 29 November.

The structure was the underlying subject. OpenAI had been founded as a non-profit whose charter placed humanity’s benefit above shareholder return, with a capped-profit subsidiary underneath and a board explicitly empowered to act on safety grounds without regard to commercial consequences. When that board used the power, it discovered it had none: employee equity, a commercial partner and customer commitments all pointed the other way.

The consequences ran for years. Sutskever left in May 2024 to found Safe Superintelligence; Jan Leike departed the same week saying safety culture had “taken a backseat to shiny products.” An independent review by WilmerHale found the removal was not prompted by concerns about product safety or finances. And OpenAI’s move toward a conventional for-profit structure, completed in stages through 2025, was argued about in the terms this week established — whether a governance mechanism designed to stop a company can survive contact with its own success.