(Yet Another) Emergency Pod: Sam Altman Is Back

In yet another head-spinning twist at OpenAI, Sam Altman was reinstated as the company’s chief executive on Tuesday night, a mere five days after the OpenAI board had fired him. The board will be overhauled and a new set of directors, including Bret Taylor and Lawrence Summers, will join. Today, we discuss how Altman returned to the top seat — and whether the OpenAI news will ever slow down.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Dell Technologies. It's time to put AI to work. Is your business ready? The challenge isn't getting started with AI. It's scaling beyond pilots while maintaining control of your data, governance, infrastructure, and costs. Dell AI Factory provides the integrated foundation you need to scale AI securely and efficiently with one trusted partner, Dell, AI on your terms. From idea to impact. Learn more at dell.com/yourwaytoAI. That's dell.com/yourwaytoAI.

• 0:35Kevin Roose?

  Casey, where are you right now?

• 0:36Casey Newton?

  Okay, first of all, you have to stop calling me Kevin. I'm trying to be on vacation over here. I am literally in the middle of Gate E8 at San Francisco International Airport.

• 0:46Kevin Roose?

  Like, is it loud there? How are you recording this?

• 0:49Casey Newton?

  It's surprisingly quiet, but only because my flight just got canceled.

• 0:52Kevin Roose?

  No. What happened?

• 0:56Casey Newton?

  Well, step one was they were waiting on some paperwork. Step two was they opened up some sort of compartment, and they said that they needed to replace a broken latch. And then during that process, they announced that something was cracked, and they were taking the airplane out of service. So the best option for us was to hop on and chat while we wait for our next plane to arrive. And that's how my Thanksgiving is going so far.

• 1:18Kevin Roose?

  I'm so sorry that happened to you. Well, how's your holiday going so far?

• 1:23Kevin Roose?

  I would say it's been very relaxing. I've just been spending quiet afternoons, reading books and catching up on sleep. No, of course, I have been in a frenzy of reporting and trying to figure out what the heck is going on behind all this drama. This is a sort of triumphal return of Sam Altman, and some OpenAI employees have been saying things like, "We are so back."

• 1:47Casey Newton?

  Well, before we get into the aftermath, Kevin, we should probably just quickly tell folks who may not have heard what happened since last week came to them in an emergency podcast just hours ago.

• 1:59Kevin Roose?

  I feel like this week has just been one never ending emergency podcast. I feel like we have really not stopped recording since Friday. But basically, here's the deal. Late Tuesday, OpenAI announced that Sam Altman was being brought back after this five day campaign that had been waged by Sam and his allies, OpenAI's employees, who had threatened to quit en masse and go work at Microsoft, as well as the company's investors. They said they had a, quote, "agreement in principle" for Sam Altman to return and that they were overhauling the company's board of directors. So Adam D'Angelo, who is the chief executive of Quora and was one of the board directors

• 2:44Kevin Roose?

  who had voted to fire Sam Altman, is staying on, but he is the only member of that board who is staying on. Helen Tonner and Tasha McCauley, two of the other board members who voted to fire Sam Altman, are leaving the board. And two new people are joining to replace them. Bret Taylor, who is an early Facebook executive and former executive of Salesforce, is coming on to the board. He will be the new chairman. And Larry Summers, the former Treasury Secretary, is also coming on to the board. So Casey, what was your reaction to this news?

• 3:20Casey Newton?

  I mean, on one hand, it was very surprising, given that there had been a few failed attempts to return Sam to this position so far. On the other hand, though, I think by the time this happened, Kevin, this really was inevitable. And there was one particular detail I read in some reporting that I want to share right now. And this was the moment where I thought, there is no way Sam Altman doesn't come back to this board. Can I just share this with you?

• 3:43Kevin Roose?

  Yes, please.

• 3:44Casey Newton?

  So this is from a story written by Kichagi Deepasetharaman and Berber Jin at the Wall Street Journal. And in their piece on the matter, they said, and this is, of course, as the board is discussing the situation with some supporters for Sam Altman. And this is the quote, "The board agreed to discuss the matter with their counsel. After a few hours, they returned, still unwilling to provide specifics." Specifics, in this case, about why Altman was fired. The story goes on. They said that Altman wasn't candid and Often got his way, the board said that Altman had been so deft, they couldn't even give a specific example, according to the people familiar with the executives. So when the people who were trying to get Sam back, asked the board, hey, no, seriously, why did you fire this guy? Their answer was, he's so good at being bad,

• 4:28Casey Newton?

  we can't even tell you what he did bad. And that was the moment where I thought, this man is going to be CEO of this company again.

• 4:34Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, that's a good observation. And it dovetails with some reporting that my colleagues and I have been doing at The Times about why Sam Altman was fired and about some of the conflicts between him and the board that have been going on for a while now. In particular, this conflict between Sam Altman and Helen Tonner, one of the board members who is departing, over this academic paper that she had written that sort of drew attention to OpenAI in a negative light. And Sam Altman was upset about this. And this is sort of part of what sparked the disagreement between him and the sort of Helen Tonner faction of the board. But obviously, you're right. We still don't know exactly what the the trigger was

• 5:19Kevin Roose?

  for firing Sam Altman. But it seems to have been vague enough or unconvincing enough that the faction of the board that wanted to push him out was not able to stand their ground. And ultimately, in these bargaining sessions, they agreed to bring him back in exchange for certain changes to the company's governance.

• 5:37Casey Newton?

  That's right. I do think that that dispute that you mentioned is important to spend another beat on, though, right? Because I do think that the entire conflict is contained in this story. OpenAI is, of course, famously a nonprofit board that runs a for-profit company. Helen represented the nonprofit board. Sam, his duty is to the nonprofit, right? He is hired essentially by the nonprofit. But I also think that his loyalties have been much more to the sort of commercial corporate side of the venture, at least as this most recent drama has been playing out. And the paper that Helen co-wrote was a paper in part about AI safety. And the thing that she and her co-authors wrote was that

• 6:19Casey Newton?

  OpenAI's rival Anthropic, which is of course cofounded by a bunch of former OpenAI people, they wrote that Anthropic had essentially built their product more safely than OpenAI had. And so you can understand why in Sam's mind, that was a betrayal, right? But you can also understand why in Helen's mind, that was just her doing her job. Her job is to make sure that AI gets built in the safest manner possible. Her job is not to protect the reputation of OpenAI. And so that appears to be where the schism was. And even if that wasn't the trigger for why Sam got fired, I think it tells you a lot about what happened over the past week.

• 6:53Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, so we'll see who gets added to the board in the coming days. This is not the final composition for the board.

• 7:00Casey Newton?

  Are you throwing your hat in the ring, by the way, Kevin?

• 7:03Kevin Roose?

  I will not serve if elected. This company has already cost me too much sleep. So it remains to be seen who will end up on the final version of the board. This is sort of being seen and portrayed as an interim board that's just there to kind of sort things out and ultimately decide who should be on the nonprofit board going forward. But I would say, you know, a couple of things. One is Microsoft is definitely going to have a bigger hand in the governance of OpenAI going forward. You know, when Microsoft did this deal with OpenAI, investing billions of dollars in the company, they were kind of a passive investor, right? They did not have a seat on the board. They were not making the decisions about the future of this company, even though this company and its technology

• 7:48Kevin Roose?

  have become very important to Microsoft's future business plans.

• 7:52Casey Newton?

  The best joke I heard about that, by the way, was from Matt Levine, who wrote something like, "Microsoft invested in a nonprofit at a valuation of $80 billion."

• 8:01Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, so Microsoft obviously will want to ensure that something like this doesn't happen again, that its investment in OpenAI is not sort of jeopardized by this nonprofit board. And so I expect that they will want a board seat going forward. And the bigger picture here, I think, and this is something that I've been writing about today, is that this war in AI between sort of the capitalists and the catastrophists.

• 8:26Casey Newton?

  That's catchy.

• 8:27Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, thank you. Who think that AI is going to be a powerful business tool and the people who worry that it's going to take over the world and destroy humanity. That war, I think, as of now, is over. The capitalists have won. The people who are now in charge of the board of OpenAI are the kind of seasoned dealmakers and Silicon Valley insiders that you would expect to govern a for-profit technology company. They are not these kind of academics and ideologues who worry that AI could become too powerful and need to be shut down. And I think that's mostly the way that things are going to be from here on out.

• 9:04Casey Newton?

  Certainly, I think the pro-safety people have lost their most important perch that they had on any sort of power in this circumstance at all. At the same time, there is a faction throughout the government, academia, in journalism, and within the industry itself that wants to build this technology in a safe way. So I don't think that disappears, but you're right, it did lose a lot of power. I think Mike's sort of wrapping up question for you, Kevin, is how much do you think this changes OpenAI? Is it the case that Monday morning rolls around and it is just back to business as usual for these folks? Or do you think that this crazy series of events will have affected Sam and the company in some profound way that might change what we expect to see from them going forward?

• 9:47Kevin Roose?

  It's hard to say. I was talking to some OpenAI employees who were going back to the office to celebrate. They were having a party at the office. I did not get invited to that party, but I was hearing dispatches from inside of it. And at one point, the fire alarm of the OpenAI offices was set off by a fog machine. In case you want to do sort of a vibe check on how people at the company are feeling right now. They are very happy, they are celebrating, they are bonded. Nothing bonds people together like going through a crisis.

• 10:19Casey Newton?

  Like the one we're having right now where I'm recording an emergency episode in the airport? It's true, I've never felt closer to you.

• 10:24Kevin Roose?

  Yes, I do feel very bonded to you right now, Casey. You know, the people I'm talking to, they think that this is going to be a real moment of reinvigoration for the company, that employees are feeling optimistic about the future, and they are now even more devoted to this mission of building AGI. And, you know, obviously, I think there are going to be some people who come out ahead or behind of this kind of reorganized, reconstituted OpenAI. And there's a lot of questions we still don't know the answers to about how the company will change going forward. But I think if you're looking for a sort of clear before and after picture of OpenAI,

• 11:05Kevin Roose?

  I would say before, there was this sense that there was this fragile structure that needed to be sort of balanced, the needs of the business and the needs of the nonprofit. And now I think people feel like the business is firmly in the driver's seat.

• 11:19Casey Newton?

  That all sounds right to me. I think the one thing I would add is that I do think the company, and Sam Altman in particular, are just going to be under more scrutiny now, right? We all learned a lot about the history of this company and of Sam Altman in particular over the past week. And I think to the extent that the company makes moves that are perceived as sort of pro corporate, pro Microsoft and anti-safety, I just think they're going to get 10 times the attention that they did before all of this happened. So, and that might be a good thing, right? So, at the end of the day, I think that the board that they had did not execute its responsibilities well and did need to go. But I do hope that you and I will keep our eye on some of the concerns that they were raising behind closed doors, even if they would never be straightforward about what those concerns actually were.

• 12:03Kevin Roose?

  Totally. Well, Casey, thank you for taking one for the team and recording an emergency podcast from the airport. I hope that you are able to get on a new flight and make your Thanksgiving plans after all.

• 12:14Casey Newton?

  Yeah. And let me just say to the people of OpenAI, this is the last one I have in me this week, okay? I don't care what kind of crazy shenanigans you guys get up to with your fog machine and your, and your, your, your fire alarms that you're pulling at, at company headquarters, you're not going to hear my voice again until next Friday, and you can count on that. And that's the hard fork promise. We are going to take a vacation. All right, maybe go grab that turkey out of the oven, Kevin. I'm starting to see some smoke coming out from the door behind you.

• 12:37Kevin Roose?

  That's just my fog machine in solidarity.

• 13:21Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Dell Technologies. It's time to put AI to work. Is your business ready? The challenge isn't getting started with AI. It's scaling beyond pilots while maintaining control of your data, governance, infrastructure, and costs. Dell AI Factory provides the integrated foundation you need to scale AI securely and efficiently with one trusted partner. Dell, AI on your terms. From idea to impact. Learn more at dell.com/yourwaytoai. That's dell.com/yourwaytoai.

• 13:55Speaker 03

  It's time to innovate at the speed of AI without compromising control. That's OutSystems. Take a look at what happened with one global retailer during a period of massive expansion. They used OutSystems to build AI agents to automate invoicing and translation processes, shifting 95% of their daily store operations to a new digital app, saving thousands of hours of manual work. OutSystems gives you the flexibility to deploy how you want and the governance to do it safely. Own your agentic future. Learn more at outsystems.com/NYT. That's outsystems.com/NYT.

• 14:30Speaker 04

  AI spend is growing fast, but most businesses still can't see exactly where that money is going. Ramp gives businesses visibility and control across AI providers with real-time guardrails by team and model, helping ensure spend goes to the highest ROI areas. Stop guessing where your AI spend is going. Get started with Ramp. And if you're new to Ramp, you can get $250 off at ramp.com/hardfork. Go to ramp.com/hardfork. Ramp.com/hardfork.

• 15:04Casey Newton?

  Hard Fork is produced by Rachel Cohn. We're edited by Jen Poyant. Today's show was engineered by Dan Ramirez. Original music by Dan Powell. Our audience editor is Nell Galogly. Video production by Ryan Manning and Dylan Bergerson. Special thanks to Polish Uman, Pui Wing Tam, Kate LaPreste, Corey Schreppel, and Jeffrey Miranda.

• 16:03Speaker 03

  Building and scaling AI today can feel pretty chaotic, mostly because teams are juggling too many fragmented tools at once. That's where Outsystems comes in. Outsystems gives you one unified agentic systems platform to manage your entire portfolio of agents, apps, and workflows. You get to innovate at the speed of AI, but with the security, governance, and control your enterprise actually needs. And the results are already there. A major manufacturer used Outsystems to build a multi-agent system that analyzes blueprints, and a global bank cut their development time by 60%. Own your agentic future today at outsystems.com/NYT.