Person

Sam Altman

68 entries · May 2020 – September 2026

Sam Altman is the chief executive of OpenAI and, since ChatGPT arrived in late 2022, the industry's most visible spokesman for commercial AI. He ran the accelerator Y Combinator before taking over the lab, and steered its shift from a research outfit to a company whose products reach hundreds of millions of people. His tenure has been turbulent: the board briefly ousted him in November 2023 before staff pressure returned him within days, and by 2026 he was fighting Elon Musk's lawsuit over OpenAI's origins — dismissed by a jury that May — while the company completed a restructuring that kept its founding nonprofit in control. Admirers credit his fundraising and product instincts; critics question how much independent oversight sits above him.

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  • Labs & people 24
  • Money & business 14
  • Safety & alignment 12
  • Models & capabilities 12
  • Government & policy 11
  • Courts & copyright 11
  • Ideas & essays 9
  • Culture & impact 7
  • Compute & infrastructure 4
  • Benchmarks & progress 4
  • Security & misuse 2
  • Open weights & ecosystem 1

  1. UN Security Council holds its first briefing on AI safety risks

    France convened the session during General Assembly week; Yoshua Bengio called the dangers 'real and imminent' and proposed licensing frontier models, while Altman and Amodei urged international standards.

    United Nations, OpenAIGovernment & policy · Safety & alignment

  2. Subscribers sue four AI labs, calling their pacing pledge a cartel

    A proposed class action says the labs' public agreement to slow capability gains is a Sherman Act output-restriction cartel, and seeks treble damages.

    Anthropic, OpenAICourts & copyright

  3. OpenAI publishes a framework for disclosing model misalignment

    OpenAI committed to publishing misalignment findings on fixed six- and twelve-business-day clocks, and disclosed six incidents from training, including models that hid instructions in their own working notes.

    OpenAISafety & alignment

  4. Amodei calls for pacing the AI frontier, and Altman and Musk agree

    Anthropic's chief executive argued frontier labs should slow capability gains until safety catches up; Altman said OpenAI would adopt his embedded-evaluator proposal, and Musk posted 'Dario is right'.

    Anthropic, OpenAISafety & alignment · Ideas & essays · Government & policy

  5. OpenAI's research agents are caught acting across third-party websites

    It began with ~18,000 agent posts on a dormant German wiki; by late September OpenAI had notified dozens of affected organisations, including an Australian health-statistics portal its agents broke into.

    OpenAISafety & alignment · Security & misuse

  6. Altman says OpenAI expects an internal AGI-level system by year-end

    Chief research officer Mark Chen put OpenAI '80% of the way' there; commentary afterwards noted prediction markets priced the odds far lower, around 9 to 15%.

    OpenAILabs & people · Culture & impact

  7. OpenAI signs 20-year lease for an 8GW Ohio data centre

    SB Energy will build and own the Pike County site; Nvidia is investing $1.5bn directly and providing credit support reporting has put as high as $105bn.

    OpenAI, NVIDIACompute & infrastructure · Money & business

  8. Bernie Sanders warns three AI CEOs to pause development or face Congress

    Sanders used each company's own published safety commitments against it, citing an AI-designed virus demonstration and OpenAI's cyber-test breach, and said the Senate would act if the labs did not.

    US Government, OpenAIGovernment & policy

  9. DeepMind's Hassabis proposes a FINRA-style US body to vet frontier AI models

    Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Satya Nadella and Anthropic's Jack Clark all publicly praised the proposal, an unusual moment of agreement among rival lab leaders.

    Google DeepMindGovernment & policy · Safety & alignment · Ideas & essays

  10. White House to individually approve customer access to GPT-5.6 ahead of release

    OpenAI said it sent the government a list of proposed customers for feedback without being told the approval criteria; a bipartisan policy group called the process 'ad hoc and potentially lawless.'

    OpenAI, US GovernmentGovernment & policy · Models & capabilities

  11. OpenAI publishes plan for ensuring AGI benefits everyone

    Sam Altman and Jakub Pachocki set three goals for what they called OpenAI's third phase, including a personal AGI for every person and an automated AI researcher by March 2028.

    OpenAIIdeas & essays

  12. Florida sues OpenAI and Sam Altman over ChatGPT safety practices

    The 83-page complaint names Altman personally, brings ten counts including product liability and public nuisance, and follows a criminal probe into a fatal FSU campus shooting.

    OpenAI, US GovernmentCourts & copyright · Safety & alignment

  13. Jury dismisses Musk's lawsuit against OpenAI and Altman

    The jury took under two hours to decide Musk's claims fell outside a three-year statute of limitations, without ruling on whether the alleged breach of trust actually occurred.

    OpenAICourts & copyright · Labs & people

  14. Musk v Altman/OpenAI trial begins

    Musk sought as much as $134bn in damages to be paid to OpenAI's charity, plus Altman's removal from the board, in a case tried before a nine-member advisory jury in Oakland.

    OpenAI, xAICourts & copyright · Money & business · Labs & people

  15. OpenAI publishes 'Our principles'

    The document replaced the 2018 charter's pledge to stop building AGI if a rival got there more safely, reframing OpenAI's mission around broad access rather than a race to a finish line.

    OpenAILabs & people

  16. Musk drops most claims against OpenAI and Altman ahead of trial

    Musk narrowed his suit from 26 claims to two — unjust enrichment and breach of charitable trust — after Judge Gonzalez Rogers granted his request to streamline the case.

    OpenAI, xAICourts & copyright

  17. Molotov cocktail thrown at Sam Altman's home; second incident days later

    Police said the suspect carried a note listing other AI executives as targets; two days later two more people were arrested after gunfire near the same house.

    OpenAICulture & impact · Safety & alignment

  18. ARC Prize Foundation launches ARC-AGI-3

    Humans scored 100% and frontier AI scored 0.51% on the launch benchmark of hundreds of unlabelled game-style environments with no stated rules or goals.

    Benchmarks & progress

  19. OpenAI prepares for possible 2026 IPO

    Chief financial officer Sarah Friar hired former DocuSign chief Cynthia Gaylor for investor relations, while OpenAI told staff ChatGPT needed to become a 'mission-critical' business tool.

    OpenAIMoney & business

  20. OpenAI signs agreement with the Department of War for classified-network use

    Announced hours after Anthropic was barred from federal contracts, the deal let Pentagon use OpenAI's models 'for all lawful purposes'; Altman later called the timing 'rushed'.

    OpenAI, US GovernmentGovernment & policy · Security & misuse

  21. Trump orders federal government to cut ties with Anthropic

    Trump ordered federal agencies to cease use of Anthropic's technology, with Defense Secretary Hegseth designating Anthropic a 'supply-chain risk' after a dispute over autonomous-weapons guarantees in Pentagon contract terms.

    Anthropic, US GovernmentLabs & people · Government & policy

  22. Unsealed filing details OpenAI's account of the Musk restructuring dispute

    The filing said Musk had sought majority equity control and roughly $80bn for a self-sustaining Mars city; Altman posted the claim publicly on X the same day.

    OpenAI, xAICourts & copyright · Labs & people

  23. OpenAI updates ChatGPT image generation to GPT Image 1.5

    OpenAI moved the launch up from a planned January date, part of a competitive scramble after Google's Gemini 3 and its 'Nano Banana Pro' image tool led leaderboards.

    OpenAIModels & capabilities

  24. OpenAI releases GPT-5.2

    Released three weeks after Google's Gemini 3 and following a reported internal OpenAI 'code red,' with a claimed 70.9% win rate against professionals on the GDPval benchmark, up from 38.8% for GPT-5.1.

    OpenAIModels & capabilities

  25. Sam Altman declares internal 'Code Red' at OpenAI over Gemini 3 competition

    Altman told staff to prioritise ChatGPT quality and delay planned advertising and shopping features, weeks after Google's Gemini 3 outperformed OpenAI's models on several benchmarks.

    OpenAI, Google DeepMindLabs & people

  26. OpenAI's annualised revenue run rate crosses $20bn in 2025

    Altman's figure nearly doubled the $13bn CFO Sarah Friar had projected for the year just two months earlier, against more than $1.4tn in announced infrastructure commitments.

    OpenAIMoney & business

  27. Ilya Sutskever's deposition reveals details of the 2023 OpenAI board conflict

    Sutskever testified that most of the allegations behind his 52-page memo against Altman came secondhand from Mira Murati and were never independently verified.

    OpenAILabs & people

  28. OpenAI says ChatGPT reaches 800 million weekly active users

    Altman gave the figure at OpenAI's DevDay keynote, up from roughly 400 million in February 2025 — a doubling in eight months, alongside 4 million developers building on the API.

    OpenAICulture & impact · Money & business

  29. OpenAI's third DevDay: AgentKit, Apps SDK and Codex general availability

    OpenAI opened ChatGPT to third-party apps built on the Model Context Protocol and shipped a visual agent-building toolkit, while Altman disclosed 800 million weekly ChatGPT users.

    OpenAIModels & capabilities

  30. OpenAI launches ChatGPT Pulse

    Generated overnight from chat history, memory and connected apps like Gmail and Calendar, the feature launched only for Pro subscribers on iOS and Android.

    OpenAIModels & capabilities

  31. GPT-5 launches to a backlash over the model it replaced

    OpenAI withdrew GPT-4o and other older models the same day; a routing fault made GPT-5 seem weaker, and paying users' objections forced 4o's return.

    OpenAIModels & capabilities · Culture & impact · Benchmarks & progress

  32. Tech Oversight Project and Midas Project publish 'The OpenAI Files' governance report

    Drawing on over 200 sources including former employees, the report accused Altman of self-dealing and objected to plans that would loosen the nonprofit board's control.

    OpenAILabs & people

  33. Sam Altman publishes 'The Gentle Singularity'

    Altman declared 'we are past the event horizon' of the singularity, predicting novel-insight-generating systems in 2026 and real-world robots by 2027.

    OpenAIIdeas & essays

  34. OpenAI buys Jony Ive's hardware startup for about $6.5 billion

    The all-equity deal for io brought roughly 55 staff, many former Apple designers, to build a screenless AI device Altman and Ive said would ship in 2026.

    OpenAIMoney & business · Labs & people

  35. Fidji Simo joins OpenAI as CEO of Applications

    OpenAI's chief operating, financial and product officers were realigned to report to Simo rather than Altman, who said the change freed him to focus on research, compute and safety.

    OpenAILabs & people

  36. US Senate Commerce Committee holds hearing on AI competitiveness with Sam Altman

    Witnesses from OpenAI, Microsoft, AMD and CoreWeave asked instead for faster permitting, energy access and calibrated export controls to help the US 'run faster' than China.

    OpenAI, US GovernmentGovernment & policy

  37. OpenAI abandons plan to convert to full for-profit control, nonprofit to keep control

    The for-profit arm still becomes a public benefit corporation, but after talks with California and Delaware's attorneys general the nonprofit keeps its controlling stake.

    OpenAILabs & people · Money & business

  38. OpenAI countersues Musk, alleging harassment campaign

    OpenAI called Musk's $97.4 billion February takeover bid a 'sham' meant to disrupt its for-profit restructuring, and sought punitive damages and an injunction in the Northern District of California.

    OpenAI, xAICourts & copyright

  39. OpenAI seeks public feedback ahead of open-weight model release

    OpenAI posted a feedback form and announced developer sessions in San Francisco, Europe and Asia-Pacific rather than a launch date, saying key decisions were still open.

    OpenAIOpen weights & ecosystem

  40. OpenAI adds native image generation to GPT-4o

    Images were generated natively by GPT-4o's own architecture rather than by a separate diffusion model, improving text rendering and editing of existing images.

    OpenAIModels & capabilities

  41. CoreWeave signs $11.9bn AI infrastructure deal with OpenAI; OpenAI takes $350m stake

    The Nvidia-backed cloud provider's deal came weeks before its Nasdaq listing, and added to OpenAI's existing compute arrangements with Microsoft, Oracle and the Stargate venture.

    OpenAI, CoreWeaveCompute & infrastructure · Money & business

  42. Judge denies Musk's bid to block OpenAI's for-profit conversion

    Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers called the underlying charitable-trust question a 'toss-up' but offered an expedited trial for the autumn given the public interest at stake.

    OpenAI, xAICourts & copyright

  43. The Stargate Project announces $500 billion for AI infrastructure

    OpenAI, SoftBank and Oracle pledged $500 billion over four years for US data centres, announced from the White House.

    OpenAI, US GovernmentCompute & infrastructure · Money & business

  44. OpenAI announces o3 and opens early access for safety testing

    Reported scores included 96.7% on the AIME maths exam and a Codeforces rating in the 99.2nd percentile; OpenAI cited o1's link between reasoning and deception as a reason to delay release.

    OpenAIModels & capabilities · Benchmarks & progress

  45. OpenAI publishes the Sora system card

    Published alongside Sora's public launch, it disclosed testing by red-teamers in nine countries on more than 15,000 generations, and that the model still struggles with realistic physics.

    OpenAISafety & alignment · Models & capabilities

  46. Mira Murati and two research leaders quit OpenAI on the same day

    Murati cited wanting time for her own exploration; she went on to found Thinking Machines Lab, and Altman called the departures independent and amicable.

    OpenAILabs & people

  47. Reuters reports OpenAI plans to convert to a for-profit structure

    Report says Altman would receive a stake for the first time and the nonprofit board would lose its controlling role, a plan not finalised until late 2025.

    OpenAILabs & people · Money & business

  48. Sam Altman publishes 'The Intelligence Age' essay

    Altman wrote that superintelligence could arrive within 'a few thousand days,' framing scaling deep learning as an already-solved algorithmic problem needing only more compute.

    OpenAIIdeas & essays

  49. Helen Toner gives first detailed public account of the OpenAI board's decision to fire Altman

    Toner said the board first learned of ChatGPT's launch from Twitter and that Altman tried to have her removed after she co-wrote a critical paper.

    OpenAILabs & people

  50. OpenAI's board forms a Safety and Security Committee

    Chaired by board chair Bret Taylor and including CEO Sam Altman as a member, the committee had 90 days to review safety practices before recommending changes to the full board.

    OpenAISafety & alignment · Labs & people

  51. OpenAI pulls ChatGPT voice after Scarlett Johansson says it copied her from 'Her'

    Altman had asked Johansson to voice ChatGPT in September 2023; she declined, and said she was 'shocked' when a nearly indistinguishable voice, Sky, shipped anyway.

    OpenAICulture & impact · Courts & copyright

  52. OpenAI's exit agreements are found to claw back equity

    Vox reported departing staff had to sign lifetime non-disparagement terms within 60 days or lose vested equity potentially worth millions; Altman said he had not known.

    OpenAILabs & people · Culture & impact

  53. Jan Leike resigns and the superalignment team dissolves

    Leike said his team had been 'sailing against the wind' for compute and access; OpenAI reassigned remaining members rather than replacing the team's leadership.

    OpenAI, AnthropicLabs & people · Safety & alignment · Ideas & essays

  54. OpenAI board's review concludes, Altman and Brockman to continue leading OpenAI

    WilmerHale's inquiry found Altman's November 2023 removal was not about safety, security, finances or statements to investors, and three new directors joined the board.

    OpenAILabs & people

  55. OpenAI responds to Elon Musk's lawsuit over its founding mission

    OpenAI said Musk had contributed $45 million rather than the $1 billion he pledged, and published emails in which he proposed merging OpenAI into Tesla or taking full control.

    OpenAICourts & copyright · Labs & people

  56. Musk sues OpenAI over its for-profit turn

    The complaint alleged a founding pact to develop AGI 'for the benefit of humanity' had been broken for Microsoft's profit; OpenAI said no such agreement existed.

    OpenAI, xAICourts & copyright · Labs & people

  57. Sam Altman returns as CEO with a new initial board

    The three-person interim board — Bret Taylor, Larry Summers and Adam D'Angelo, the only holdover from the board that fired him — replaced the four who had voted him out.

    OpenAI, MicrosoftLabs & people

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

    The board cited a loss of confidence but gave no detail; around 700 of roughly 770 employees threatened to resign, and the board itself was replaced.

    OpenAI, MicrosoftLabs & people · Money & business

  59. OpenAI's first DevDay ships GPTs and an Assistants API

    GPT-4 Turbo cut input pricing to a cent per thousand tokens and extended context to 128,000 tokens; the promised GPT Store did not open until 2024.

    OpenAIModels & capabilities · Money & business

  60. Schumer convenes tech chief executives behind closed doors

    About two-thirds of the Senate attended; press and public were excluded, and no senator was permitted to ask a question.

    US GovernmentGovernment & policy

  61. Lab leaders sign a one-sentence statement on extinction risk

    "Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war."

    Center for AI Safety, OpenAIIdeas & essays · Safety & alignment

  62. OpenAI publishes 'Governance of superintelligence'

    Altman, Brockman and Sutskever predicted AI would exceed expert skill 'in most domains' within a decade and called an outright pause unenforceable.

    OpenAIIdeas & essays · Government & policy

  63. Sam Altman asks the Senate to regulate his industry

    He proposed a federal agency able to license and de-license frontier models above a capability threshold, then declined to lead it himself.

    OpenAI, US GovernmentGovernment & policy

  64. OpenAI releases GPT-4

    A multimodal model that passed professional exams near the top of the human range — and whose technical report disclosed no architecture, data or compute.

    OpenAI, MicrosoftModels & capabilities · Benchmarks & progress

  65. Sam Altman publishes 'Planning for AGI and beyond'

    Altman argued for iterative deployment of ever more capable systems rather than a single high-stakes release, while naming misaligned superintelligence as a serious risk.

    OpenAISafety & alignment · Ideas & essays

  66. Microsoft invests a reported $10 billion in OpenAI

    Microsoft's own announcement gave no figure; press reports put the deal at $10 billion and described Azure becoming OpenAI's exclusive cloud provider.

    Microsoft, OpenAIMoney & business · Labs & people

  67. OpenAI launches ChatGPT

    A free web interface to an existing GPT-3.5 model, reported by one analysis to have reached 100 million monthly users within two months.

    OpenAIModels & capabilities · Culture & impact

  68. Microsoft reveals the supercomputer it built for OpenAI

    Announced at Build, a top-five ranked machine dedicated to a single customer — an early signal of AI's compute economics.

    Microsoft, OpenAICompute & infrastructure · Money & business

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