Sam Altman, chief executive officer of OpenAI Inc., during a media tour of the Stargate AI data center in Abilene, Texas, US, on Tuesday, Sept. 23, 2025.
Ahead of the Super Bowl on Sunday, OpenAI has been busy playing defense.
CEO Sam Altman and a wave of senior executives at the artificial intelligence startup took to social media this week to try and dispel concerns about the company's partnerships, litigation, research operations and swipes from its biggest rival, Anthropic.
In a podcast appearance on Thursday, Altman said he often feels like there is a "crazy hurricane" turning around the company, and sometimes his leadership team has to try and "correct" narratives.
"It is a strange way to live," Altman said. "I don't know of any private company that has ever been so in the news and so under a microscope, and at some level, it's frustrating."
OpenAI has become one of the fastest-growing commercial entities on the planet since the launch of its chatbot ChatGPT in 2022. But the company has been under intense scrutiny since it inked more than $1.4 trillion worth of infrastructure deals last year, including a $100 billion partnership with Nvidia that rocked the tech sector.
Questions about the state of that partnership began swirling a week ago after the Wall Street Journal reported that the deal is "on ice."
An OpenAI spokesperson told the Journal that the company is "actively working through details" of the partnership.
But speculation about a potential rift continued on Monday after Reuters reported that OpenAI is "unsatisfied" with some of Nvidia's chips. A spokesperson told CNBC that Nvidia "powers the vast majority of OpenAI's inference fleet and delivers the best performance per dollar for inference."
The reports prompted Altman to weigh in directly.
... continue reading