An ousted OpenAI board member broke her silence to claim a company attorney used an “intimidation tactic” as part of the heated negotiations to reinstate Sam Altman as CEO days after his shock firing.
Helen Toner, a 31-year-old academic from Australia, was among the four board members shown the door following the failed coup attempt.
At one point during intense negotiations to bring back Altman, an OpenAI lawyer said that Toner and other board members could be in violation of their fiduciary duties to investors if the company collapsed following Altman’s firing, the Wall Street Journal reported.
“He was trying to claim that it would be illegal for us not to resign immediately, because if the company fell apart we would be in breach of our fiduciary duties,” Toner said. “But OpenAI is a very unusual organization, and the nonprofit mission — to ensure [artificial general intelligence] benefits all of humanity — comes first.”
Toner said she viewed the lawyer’s words as an “intimidation tactic” — and replied that Altman’s removal would “actually be consistent with the mission” of the nonprofit to ensure AI safety above an individual company’s success.
“Our goal in firing Sam was to strengthen OpenAI and make it more able to achieve its mission,” Toner added.
Toner, the director of strategy at Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology, and the rest of the board members did not reveal the reason for their decision to fire Altman, stating only that he had not been “consistently candid” in his communications with them.
While Toner declined to comment more specifically on why the board members moved against Altman, the report did shed some more light on internal tensions ahead of the decision.
Altman was reportedly peeved in October after Toner co-authored a paper in which she jabbed at OpenAI for creating a “sense of urgency inside major tech companies” with its release of ChatGPT that accelerated competition at the expense of AI safety.
Altman initially “confronted” Toner about the paper, arguing her words were harmful to the company, and then “went behind her back” to get other board members to fire her, the Journal reported, citing people familiar with the matter.
The back-channel effort against Toner purportedly backfired, with some board members allegedly determining that Altman had attempted to mislead one of them into thinking that another was on board with his push to remove her as a director.
The incident was reportedly one of several catalysts that led to Altman’s firing.
OpenAI representatives did not immediately return a request for comment.
Aside from Toner, other departing OpenAI board directors included Tasha McCauley of GeoSim Systems and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, who later tweeted that he regretted participating in Altman’s removal.
Altman and fellow OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman have also left the board.
Meanwhile, Quora founder Adam D’Angelo, one of the members who initially voted against Altman, retained his seat on a reconstituted board that also includes former Twitter chair Bret Taylor and ex-Treasury Secretary Larry Summers.
Ultimately, OpenAI plans to build a nine-person board in place of the previous version, with key investor Microsoft also holding a non-voting observer seat.
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