OpenAI fires and rehires its chief executive

At noon on Friday 17 November 2023, OpenAI's board announced that Sam Altman had been dismissed because he had not been "consistently candid in his communications" with it. Greg Brockman resigned as chairman that evening. Ilya Sutskever, the chief scientist, had voted for the removal. Over the weekend Microsoft, which had invested thirteen billion dollars and been told minutes before the announcement, offered Altman and anyone who followed him jobs; by Monday more than 700 of the company's 770 employees, Sutskever among them, had signed a letter threatening to leave. On Wednesday Altman was reinstated and the board replaced.

The board had been the mechanism by which OpenAI's non-profit mission was supposed to constrain its commercial arm. It had used that power once, and the outcome showed that the power did not exist: the staff, the investors and the customers wanted the company to continue as it was. The safety researchers who had argued for caution, including Sutskever, left over the following year.

The episode is on this timeline because it settled a question about governance that the summits were still debating. Whatever checked the laboratories, it would not be their own boards.