Sam Altman is back on OpenAI’s board, adding another turn to the leadership crisis that began when he was suddenly fired as CEO and removed as a director last November. OpenAI said Friday that Altman would return to the board alongside three new directors: Sue Desmond-Hellmann, Nicole Seligman, and Fidji Simo.
The announcement landed at the same time as OpenAI released a summary of an internal investigation conducted by WilmerHale. That review found that Altman’s earlier conduct “did not mandate removal,” while also describing “a breakdown in trust” between Altman and the prior board.
What the investigation found
The investigation was commissioned by three existing board members and carried out by the law firm WilmerHale. According to OpenAI’s summary, the review involved more than 30,000 documents and interviews with dozens of people.
WilmerHale found that the four board members who removed Altman had accurately described their reasoning when they cited concerns about his lack of candor with the board. But the review also found that they had not expected the firing to destabilize the company.
OpenAI’s summary said the decision was not driven by concerns about product safety or security, the pace of development, OpenAI’s finances, or its statements to investors, customers, or business partners. Instead, the summary framed the episode as a failure of trust and process.
OpenAI also said the board acted within an “abridged timeframe,” without advance notice to key stakeholders, without a full inquiry, and without giving Altman an opportunity to respond to the concerns. OpenAI released only a summary of the findings, not the complete report.
Altman tries to close the chapter
On a press call Friday, Altman presented the investigation as a point of closure. “I’m pleased this whole thing is over,” he said.
He also criticized the way the dispute played out publicly, saying “it’s been disheartening to see some people with an agenda trying to use leaks in the press to hurt the company, hurt the mission.” At the same time, he acknowledged that the experience had taught him something.
Altman said he “did learn a lot from this experience” and apologized over one incident involving an unnamed board member. The source article said that appeared to refer to former OpenAI director Helen Toner, a researcher at the Center for Security and Emerging Technology, a Georgetown think tank.
After Toner published a research analysis that criticized the speed of OpenAI’s product launch decisions, Altman reportedly tried to remove her from the board. “I think I could have handled that situation with more grace and care—I apologize for that,” he said.
Late on Friday, Toner posted a statement on X attributed to her and Tasha McCauley. Toner, McCauley, and OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever were removed from the company’s board as part of the deal that restored Altman as CEO in November. “We hope the new board does its job in governing OpenAI and holding at accountable to the mission,” the statement said in part. “As we told the investigators, deception, manipulation, and resistance to thorough oversight should be unaccceptable.”
The new OpenAI board members
OpenAI had been looking to expand its board for months after forming an interim board following the November turmoil. The expanded board now includes Altman and three veteran business executives, all women.
- Sue Desmond-Hellmann is the former CEO of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. She also served on Facebook’s board from 2013 through 2019, stepping down to focus on her Gates Foundation role.
- Nicole Seligman is a former Sony general counsel. Her experience in media and entertainment may be relevant as OpenAI faces numerous lawsuits from content publishers alleging that it used their content to develop systems such as ChatGPT.
- Fidji Simo is the CEO and chair of Instacart and a former Facebook executive. Her previous work at Facebook included overseeing video projects and managing the company’s primary mobile app for a couple of years. She also sits on Shopify’s board.
Desmond-Hellmann’s connection to Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates could also matter because Microsoft has pledged $13 billion to OpenAI. After Altman’s ejection last year, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella complained that he was surprised by the move. Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Why governance remains central
OpenAI’s governance has drawn intense scrutiny because the company develops ChatGPT, Dall-E, and other services that helped drive the boom in generative AI technologies over the past couple of years. The structure is unusual in tech: OpenAI’s nonprofit entity oversees a for-profit arm working on AI development.
The November crisis began when four members of the nonprofit board fired Altman. They said concerns about his communications with the board not being consistently candid were part of their justification.
The move quickly escalated. Microsoft said it would hire Altman and Brockman, OpenAI employees threatened to quit en masse, and more than 95 percent of OpenAI employees threatened to quit if Altman was not brought back. Days later, Altman was reinstated as CEO.
Bret Taylor, chair of OpenAI’s board, said Friday that the board’s expansion to seven members came with additional governance changes. He said those changes included new corporate governance guidelines, a new and enhanced conflict of interest policy, and a whistleblower hotline.
Taylor also said the board would continue to expand and had created new committees, including one called Mission & Strategy. Those changes are meant to improve oversight of the nonprofit after a dispute that exposed how much OpenAI’s leadership structure matters to employees, partners, and the wider generative AI market.
Questions remain about transparency. OpenAI’s nonprofit arm had for years said in regulatory filings that its governance documents and conflict rules were open to public inspection, but said that policy had changed when WIRED asked to see the documents after last year’s drama. Elon Musk, who helped found OpenAI but is no longer involved with it, cited that policy change when he sued the ChatGPT maker last week for allegedly breaching its mission.
On Friday, OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment on whether it would publish the new and updated policies. Asked for more detail, Taylor said, “I'm not an expert in this place. A lot of our policies are public documents. I'm not sure what is and what isn’t? So I apologize, I don’t have a great answer for you right now.”