The OpenAI Board Crisis of November 2023 was the brief removal of Sam Altman as CEO of OpenAI by the company's non-profit board, and his reinstatement within five days following nearly universal employee protest.
On Friday 17 November 2023, the OpenAI board announced that Altman had been removed as CEO, citing a loss of confidence in his "candour with the board". Mira Murati, then CTO, was named interim CEO. Greg Brockman, OpenAI's president and Altman's longtime collaborator, resigned in solidarity. Within 48 hours, Microsoft offered to hire the entire OpenAI team and the company's nearly 800 employees signed an open letter threatening to resign en masse unless Altman was reinstated.
Over the following weekend, board members negotiated with Altman, employees, investors, Microsoft and others. By Wednesday 22 November, Altman was reinstated as CEO, the board was largely reconstituted, and Brockman returned. The episode lasted five days from removal to reinstatement.
The board crisis is generally taken as the moment at which the tension between OpenAI's founding non-profit safety mission and its commercial trajectory became irretrievably public. The reconstituted board has subsequently had several further changes; the original 2015 governance structure has effectively been replaced.
The episode is sometimes pointed to as evidence that the AI industry's structural pressures favour rapid commercialisation over safety-mission preservation, and as motivation for external regulatory oversight rather than reliance on internal governance.
Related terms: sam-altman, OpenAI, ilya-sutskever
Discussed in:
- Chapter 16: Ethics & Safety, AI Safety