OpenAI boss Sam Altman is a sociopath who cannot be trusted, tech insiders say

Karen Hao’s book “Empire of AI” already revealed quite a bit about the machinations within OpenAI, the most famous AI startup in the world. Now, a brilliant new profile of the company’s CEO, Sam Altman, goes further and quotes numerous insiders calling him a sociopath.

For The New Yorker investigative piece, sources in the extremely competitive AI tech industry paint Altman, 40, as a calculating liar who wants everyone to like him but actually manipulates even the people closest to him to get what he wants.

Yes, Altman has traveled the world preaching AI safety and is frequently labeled as the “Oppenheimer of our age.” He likes the comparison and has once pointed out that he shares his birthday with J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist who oversaw the development of the first nuclear weapons.

But Oppenheimer at least felt profound remorse regarding the destructive power of the atomic bomb. Altman, insiders told Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz, is radically different when it comes to AI safety.

To him, the article reads, the concept of safe AI development is just a bargaining chip to get talented engineers and prominent thinkers on board.

Altman – who has consistently promised to be a safe steward for AI – allegedly regularly goes back on his word and is believed by some of his colleagues to simply be not trustworthy enough to “have his finger on the button.”

Some insiders are indeed very blunt, one current OpenAI board member calling Altman a “sociopath.”

“He’s unconstrained by truth,” the source told The New Yorker.

“He has two traits that are almost never seen in the same person. The first is a strong desire to please people, to be liked in any given interaction. The second is almost a sociopathic lack of concern for the consequences that may come from deceiving someone.”

Aaron Swartz, the hacktivist and coder who worked with Altman at the Silicon Valley incubator Y Combinator and killed himself in 2013, is also quoting from his grave.

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“You need to understand that Sam can never be trusted,” Swartz allegedly told one confidante. “He is a sociopath. He would do anything.”

In 2008, when Altman was just a 23-year-old fundraiser, co-founder of Y Combinator Paul Graham wrote: “You could parachute him [Altman] into an island full of cannibals and come back in 5 years and he’d be the king.”

Another tech executive who has worked with the OpenAI CEO paints him as “unbelievably persuasive.”

Indeed, it looks like Altman has tricked many. One of the alleged victims of Altman’s double-dealing is Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who previously worked at OpenAI but left over disagreements about AI safety.

The New Yorker has obtained some notes where Amodei wrote about OpenAI negotiating a huge investment from Microsoft back in 2019. Many at the startup were worried the tech giant would override OpenAI’s safety commitments, and Amodei made Altman agree to a ranked list of safety demands.

But when the deal was closing in, Amodei reportedly discovered a provision that neutralized the top demand on the list. When confronted, Altman denied the provision’s existence, even after Amodei read the provision aloud to him.

Still, Altman’s relationship with Microsoft, particularly its CEO Satya Nadella, is no better. One executive told The New Yorker that Altman “has misrepresented, distorted, renegotiated, and reneged on agreements.”

For instance, earlier this year, OpenAI reaffirmed Microsoft as the exclusive provider for its AI models, but on the same day, it announced a $50 billion deal with Amazon as the exclusive reseller of its “Frontier” platform for AI agents.

No wonder Microsoft is now considering legal action. A company representative told Financial Times: “We know our contract. We will sue them if they ​breach it. If Amazon and OpenAI ​want to take a bet on the creativity of their contractual lawyers, I would back us, ​not them.”

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