I saw that before I read the article and it made me read the article in a very different way than I normally do. As I was reading, I found myself thinking, "Why is it worded that way? What else is the writer trying to say, or not say?"

It made reading this a lot more interactive than I normally associate with passive reading. Great job, Ronan!

Amodei and his sister saw through the behavior and called it out.

" “Eighty per cent of the charter was just betrayed,” Amodei recalled. He confronted Altman, who denied that the provision existed. Amodei read it aloud, pointing to the text, and ultimately forced another colleague to confirm its existence to Altman directly. (Altman doesn’t remember this.) Amodei’s notes describe escalating tense encounters, including one, months later, in which Altman summoned him and his sister, Daniela, who worked in safety and policy at the company, to tell them that he had it on “good authority” from a senior executive that they had been plotting a coup. Daniela, the notes continue, “lost it,” and brought in that executive, who denied having said anything. As one person briefed on the exchange recalled, Altman then denied having made the claim. “I didn’t even say that,” he said. “You just said that,” Daniela replied. (Altman said that this was not quite his recollection, and that he had accused the Amodeis only of “political behavior.”) In 2020, Amodei, Daniela, and other colleagues left to found Anthropic, which is now one of OpenAI’s chief rivals."

FYI: I am by far not the only one to have experienced this and it 100% impacts hiring and other decisions at OpenAI.

You can subtly see residue of this frustration in Dalton and Michael’s videos when Sam Altman comes up. It’s only thinly veiled that Sam was a snake while at YC.

At one point you mentioned an interaction with OpenAI staff where you were looking to interview AI Safety researchers. You were rebuffed b/c "existential safety isn't a thing". Does this mean that you could find no evidence of a AI Safety team at OAI after Jan Leike left? If you look at job postings it does seem like they have significant safety staff...

Fantastic reporting.

> “Well, I like racing cars. I have five, including two McLarens and an old Tesla. I like flying rented planes all over California. Oh, and one odd one—I prep for survival. My problem is that when my friends get drunk they talk about the ways the world will end. After a Dutch lab modified the H5N1 bird-flu virus, five years ago, making it super contagious, the chance of a lethal synthetic virus being released in the next twenty years became, well, nonzero. The other most popular scenarios would be A.I. that attacks us and nations fighting with nukes over scarce resources. I try not to think about it too much, but I have guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israeli Defense Force, and a big patch of land in Big Sur I can fly to.”

> "If you believe that all human lives are equally valuable, and you also believe that 99.5 per cent of lives will take place in the future, we should spend all our time thinking about the future. But I do care much more about my family and friends.”

> "The thing most people get wrong is that if labor costs go to zero... The cost of a great life comes way down. If we get fusion to work and electricity is free, then transportation is substantially cheaper, and the cost of electricity flows through to water and food. People pay a lot for a great education now, but you can become expert level on most things by looking at your phone. So, if an American family of four now requires seventy thousand dollars to be happy, which is the number you most often hear, then in ten to twenty years it could be an order of magnitude cheaper, with an error factor of 2x. Excluding the cost of housing, thirty-five hundred to fourteen thousand dollars could be all a family needs to enjoy a really good life.”

> "...we’re going to have unlimited wealth and a huge amount of job displacement, so basic income really makes sense. Plus, the stipend will free up that one person in a million who can create the next Apple.”

https://harpers.org/archive/2026/03/childs-play-sam-kriss-ai...

However, it's a shame that the only way to subscribe to the print version is to pay $260 upfront for the yearly subscription. Meanwhile the digital version is $1/week ($52 upfront) for one year, or even just $10 for one month.

Ronan interesting writing as always. I’m curious if the role of the media as a pawn of the rich and powerful to sway perception and build narratives concerns you, especially given your personal experiences with this and the reporting you’ve done. Are there reforms you think reporters and/or news organizations should adopt to make sure access doesn’t become direct or indirect manipulation and how do you fight against that in your own reporting?

> "Employees now call this moment “the Blip,” after an incident in the Marvel films in which characters disappear from existence and then return, unchanged, to a world profoundly altered by their absence."

This is a very small detail, but an instinctive grimace crosses my face at the thought of these sort of Marvel references and I'm not entirely sure why.

> Amodei’s notes describe escalating tense encounters, including one, months later, in which Altman summoned him and his sister, Daniela, who worked in safety and policy at the company, to tell them that he had it on “good authority” from a senior executive that they had been plotting a coup. Daniela, the notes continue, “lost it,” and brought in that executive, who denied having said anything. As one person briefed on the exchange recalled, Altman then denied having made the claim. “I didn’t even say that,” he said. “You just said that,” Daniela replied.

This statement rings true.

JL, PG has mentioned often, is his weapon to test the “people” integrity aspect of YC / Startups. It’s not lost on me both Altman and Thiel both associated with YC were useful short term only, highlighting how regular “character” evaluations are required at higher levels of responsibility.

Or maybe they were not so much "worried" but "hopeful" that they'd amass literally all the wealth in the world.

I can't imagine having such uninspired thoughts and actually writing them down while in a role of such diverse and worthwhile opportunities. I'd like to ask "how the hell do these people find themselves in these positions", but I think the answer is literally what he wrote in his diary. What a boring answer. We need to filter these people out at every turn, but instead they're elevated to the highest peaks of power.

Few people have left openai over the year - safety abandonments, non profit status change, deception etc. but there is too much money involved. Here lies the actual rub. A lot of people involved and named in the article are reprehensible, kushners, saudis, Emiratis, PayPal mafia, vc folks with god complexes. But as long as they have the money, we have to dance to their tune.

We really really need a way for our society to be more equitable and hold these people responsible.

Sam Altman clearly has a long history of nefarious activity. But the underlying threat posted by AI to society, the economy and human freedom persists with or without his presence.

This technology needs to become a commodity to destroy this aggregation of power between a few organizations with untrustworthy incentives and leadership.

> In 2017, Amodei hired Page Hedley, a former public-interest lawyer, to be OpenAI’s policy and ethics adviser. In an early PowerPoint presentation to executives, Hedley outlined how OpenAI might avert a “catastrophic” arms race—perhaps by building a coalition of A.I. labs that would eventually coördinate with an international body akin to NATO, to insure that the technology was deployed safely. As Hedley recalled it, Brockman didn’t understand how this would help the company beat its competitors. “No matter what I said,” Hedley told us, “Greg kept going back to ‘So how do we raise more money? How do we win?’ ” According to several interviews and contemporaneous records, Brockman offered a counterproposal: OpenAI could enrich itself by playing world powers—including China and Russia—against one another, perhaps by starting a bidding war among them. According to Hedley, the thinking seemed to be, It worked for nuclear weapons, why not for A.I.?

The main reason is that he gets all the downsides without the upsides. I know $5B is a lot but, for a 700B company, it isn't. If OpenAI was a regular for-profit, he would have been worth >$100B already.

This is probably one of the significant factors why other co-founders left too. It's just a lot of headaches with relatively low reward.

Altman SAYS he does not recall the exchange. Not the same thing.

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/s/VWJVBNzc2u

>"He acknowledged that the alignment problem remained unsolved, but he redefined it—rather than being a deadly threat, it was an inconvenience, like the algorithms that tempt us to waste time scrolling on Instagram."

Before "don't be evil" was a cliche, I think it was a real guiding principle at Google and they built a world class business that way.

Facebook's rival ad platform didn't have search queries to target ads at. Aggressive utilization of user data was the only way they could build an Adwords-scale business. As they pushed this norm, Google followed.

Doomscroll addiction gets a lot of attention because engineers and journalists have children and parents. There are other risks though. Political stability, for example.

By early 2010s, smartphones were reaching places that had almost no modern media previously. Often powered by FB-exclusive data plans. The Arab spring happened, then ISIS. FB-centric propaganda seemingly played a major role in a major conflict/atrocity in Burma. Coups in Africa powered by social media based propaganda. Worrying political implications in the west. Unhinged uncle syndrome. Etc. Social media risks/implications were more than just "inconvenience."

At no point did we really see tech companies go into mitigation mode. Even CYA was relatively limited. There was no moment of truth. It was business as usual.

So... I think OpenAI's initial charter was naive. Science fiction almost. It was never going to withstand commercial reality, politics, competition and suchlike. I think these are greater than the individuals involved.

That doesn't mean we should ignore, excuse or otherwise tolerate lack of integrity. But, I don't think it is a way of reducing risk.

Whether the risk is skynet, economic turmoil, politics, psych epidemics or whatever... I don't think the personal integrity of executives is a major factor.

Literally, the only hope for humanity is that large language models prove to be a dead-end in ASI research.

---

1: “He’s unconstrained by truth,” the board member told us. “He has two traits that are almost never seen in the same person. The first is a strong desire to please people, to be liked in any given interaction. The second is almost a sociopathic lack of concern for the consequences that may come from deceiving someone.” — I guess now I know of two people with these traits.

We're just in this shitty pit of despair where people are desperate. It's difficult to campaign for good when you're struggling and capital can jerk people around.

People pursue good for the sake of good at cost to themselves when times are very good or times are very, very bad.

Right now times are only merely very bad.

I am fairly confident when I say this -- sama is a sociopath. I don't know how anyone with solid intuition could even come to any other conclusion than the guy is deeply weird and off-putting.

Some concepts from the book:

> Core trait: The defining characteristic is the absence of conscience, meaning they feel no guilt, shame, or remorse.

> Identification: Sociopaths can be charming and appear normal, but they often lie, cheat, and manipulate to get what they want.

> The Rule of Threes: One lie is a mistake, two is a concern, but three lies or broken promises is a pattern of a liar.

> Trust your instincts over a person's social role (e.g., doctor, leader, parent)

Check and check.

OpenAI is too important to trust sama with. He needs to go. In fact, AI should be considered a public good, not a commodity pay-as-you-go intelligence service.

shamefully have to admit that my monkey-brain smirked because of an accidental 67-meme in a serious article.

Isn't this really what everything is about? A pure research non-profit transitioned to a revenue generating enterprise because it had to, and a lot of people don't like that. Does that make it evil?

It's romantic to think that the magic of science and research can stand on its own, but even Ilya has admitted more recently that SSI needs to ship something consumer facing.

Anthropic, the lab that put all of its social capital in the safetyism basket, is having the exact same realization, with Claude Code being a mess of technically reckless vibe coded slop that nevertheless is the cash cow for the company.

Maybe it's time for everyone to realize that for an innovation this big to come to bear, it either needs to be state funded, or privately funded, the latter requiring revenue and a plausible vision of generating ROI.

I just don’t feel like OpenAI has a legitimate shot at winning any of the AI battles.

Therefore, I feel like “Sam Altman may control our future” is a far stretch.

The only high profile person in AI I’d consider perhaps worthy of trust is Demis Hassabis.

for me, the answer >>> we need to create our own systems. decentralized agent networks and etc.

if you don't want to depend on one person or one company controlling your AI, build your own infrastructure.

the concentration of power in one/two persons is the problem.

The overall response and particularly the body language speaks a lot.

If for no other reason, given what happened when the board fired him... no. I'd say not.

Still, there's something oddly reassuring here: if you believe "AI safety" is essentially a buzzword (as I do), then this whole affair comes down to people squabbling over money and power. There really is nothing new under the sun.

How is this even a question?

I’ve always been a huge fan of Ronan Farrow’s journalism and willingness to speak truth to power. I think he’s pulling at exactly the right thread here, and it’s very important to counteract Altman’s reputation laundering given that we run a very real risk of him weaseling his way into the taxpayer’s wallet under the current administration.

The real question is: can anyone be trusted if the fever dreams of super-intelligence come true? Go ahead and replace Sam Altman with someone else - will it make a difference? Any other CEO is going to be under the same overwhelming pressure to make a profit somehow. I think the OpenAI story is messier because it was founded for supposedly altruistic reasons, and then changed.

Methinks many of Altman's detractors protesteth too much. He's doing his job as it is defined (make OpenAI profitable.) Nothing of substance in this article seemed to make him exceptionally "sociopathic" compared to any other tech CEO. It goes with the territory.

What depressed me most is that trillions of dollars are being raised for building what will undoubtedly be used as a weapon. My guess is the ROI on that money is going to be extremely bad for the most part (AI will make some people insanely rich, but it is hard to see how the big investors will get a return.) Could you imagine if the world shared the same vision for energy infrastructure (so we could also stop fighting wars over control of fossil fuels and spewing CO2?) A man can dream...

The last person that this happened to was Sam Bankman Fried as investors and regular folk finally realized he was full of complete shit and could only talk the game for so long until the truth emerged.

Anyone who deliberately seeks power should not be given it.

lol do you think these guys have ever been hit? Let alone in the face. They’d probably be less eager to mouth off as much as they do if so.

The whole AI safety thing has always seemed extreme to me and has turned out to be a storm in a teacup. All those prominent people who used to tell us how AI will end humanity seem to have stopped talking about it.

I get the sense that Altman is not particularly like-able person but Bill Gates and Steve Jobs both seem to have scored a 10/10 on their “is this guy a jerk” rating, it’s common for tech CEOs.

So, the article and headline are dramatic but not much really there.

I think all the AI safety obsessed people turn out to have been the ones off course.

These sociopaths are so good at giving away nothing. He managed to engender sympathy instead of saying "I'm not gonna talk about anything that happened then".

Also very weird how many of these people are so deeply-linked that they'll drop everything they're doing just to get this guy back in power? Terrifying cabal.

No, he cannot.

TLDR but just the heading is already ugly. No single person no matter how nice they're should be able to control our future. Power corrupts, what fucking trust. We are supposed to be democratic society (well looking at what is going on around this is becoming laughable)

https://www.reuters.com/technology/openai-signs-deal-with-co...

This is a damage control piece, and you see that the most stinging comments here get downvoted.

2. You cannot "control" superintelligent AI.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...

The biggest flaw is that it spends way too much time on high-school level drama and "he-said-she-said" gossip about Sam Altman’s personal life instead of focusing on the actual technical and corporate capture of OpenAI.

The author treats the "nonprofit mission" like some holy quest that was "betrayed," when anyone with a brain in tech saw the Microsoft deal as the moment the original vision died. Instead of a hard-hitting look at how compute-monopolies are actually forming (MSFT AMZN NVDA and circular debt dealing inflating the AI bubble that could crash the economy), we get 5,000 words of hand-wringing over whether Sam is a "nice guy" or a "liar."

Who cares???????

The board failed because they had no real leverage against billions of dollars, not because they didn't write enough Slack messages. It's a long-winded way of saying "Silicon Valley has internal politics," which isn't news to anyone here.

I could more or less infer the rest from that.

I’d be more concerned about Anthropic both being in the good graces of the public and having access to all of our computers indirectly with Claude Code.