is The Verge’s senior AI reporter. An AI beat reporter for more than five years, her work has also appeared in CNBC, MIT Technology Review, Wired UK, and other outlets.
“What did Ilya see?” Two years ago, it was the meme seen ‘round the world (or at least ‘round the tech industry). OpenAI CEO Sam Altman had been briefly ousted in November 2023 by members of the company’s board of directors, including his longtime collaborator and fellow cofounder Ilya Sutskever. The board claimed Altman “was not consistently candid in his communications with the board,” undermining their confidence in him. He was out for less than a week before being reinstated after hundreds of employees threatened to resign. But observers wondered: What hadn’t Altman been candid about? And what led Sutskever to turn against him?
Now, new details have come to light in a legal deposition involving Sutskever, part of Musk’s ongoing lawsuit against Altman and OpenAI. For nearly 10 hours on October 1st, bookended by repeated sniping between Musk’s and Sutsever’s attorneys, Sutskever answered questions about the turmoil around Altman’s ouster, from conflicts between executives to short-lived merger talks with Anthropic. He testified that from personal experience and documentation he’d viewed, he’d seen Altman pit high-ranking executives against each other and offer conflicting information about his plans for the company, telling people what they wanted to hear.
The testimony paints a picture of a leader who could be manipulative and chameleon-like in the relentless pursuit of his own agenda — though Sutskever expressed hesitation about his reliance on some of the secondhand accounts later in testimony, saying he “learned the critical importance of firsthand knowledge for matters like this.”
OpenAI did not provide an on-the-record comment by publication time, but after an investigation conducted by the company wrapped up, board chair Bret Taylor said in 2024 that “We have unanimously concluded that Sam and Greg are the right leaders for OpenAI.”
Sutskever co-founded OpenAI with Altman and others after he left Google in 2015, which awarded him a seat on the board and a place in the C-suite as the company’s chief scientist. But by 2023, he’d become a chronicler of dissatisfaction with Altman. In the deposition he said that either one or all three of OpenAI’s independent board members at the time had asked him, after having discussions about executives’ concerns about Altman, to prepare a collection of screenshots and other documentation. So he did — and he sent the 52-page memo to board members Adam D’Angelo, Helen Toner, and Tasha McCauley.
When asked why he didn’t send it to Altman, Sutskever said, “Because I felt that, had he become aware of these discussions, he would just find a way to make them disappear.” He also said that he had been waiting to propose Altman’s removal for “at least a year” before it happened.
Sutskever said he sent a separate memo detailing concerns about OpenAI president Greg Brockman. The memos were sent in the form of disappearing emails, but “various lawyers” have a copy of both, according to the deposition.
The lawyers weren’t on great terms with each other, either. Image: CourtListener
The crux of Sutskever’s issues was that Altman “exhibits a consistent pattern of lying, undermining his execs, and pitting his execs against one another.” That’s a quote from the very first page of the memo he sent about Altman, which lawyers read aloud during the deposition.
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