OpenAI’s board fires Sam Altman and reinstates him five days later
OpenAI’s board removed Sam Altman as chief executive on 17 November 2023, saying it no longer had confidence in his leadership, and named Mira Murati interim chief executive. After nearly all staff threatened to resign and Microsoft pressed, Altman was back on 22 November.
Why it mattered The most public governance failure at a major AI laboratory ended with Altman and Microsoft holding more influence over OpenAI’s nonprofit-controlled board than they had before it.
OpenAI was controlled by the board of a nonprofit. On Friday 17 November 2023 that board removed Sam Altman as chief executive, saying it “no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI”. Mira Murati, the chief technology officer, was named interim chief executive the same day.
The board did not set out what Altman was said to have done. The reaction inside the company ran one way only: nearly all of OpenAI’s staff signed a letter saying they would leave unless the directors did. Microsoft, which had announced a multibillion-dollar investment in January and supplied the computing the company ran on, pressed for his return.
There was a third chief executive in the gap. Emmett Shear, formerly of Twitch, held the job over a weekend.
Altman was reinstated on 22 November, five days after his removal. A new initial board was named alongside him: Bret Taylor, Larry Summers and Adam D’Angelo.
Nothing in those five days changed what OpenAI sold or how its models worked. What changed was the answer to a narrow question about who can remove the company’s chief executive, and the answer that emerged left Altman and Microsoft with more weight than the structure had given them before. Google announced Gemini two weeks later, and the European Union reached its political deal on the AI Act two weeks after that.