New Yorker published a major investigation into Sam Altman and OpenAI today — based on never-before-disclosed internal memos and 100+ interviews

Ronan Farrow spent 18 months reporting this piece, drawing on internal documents that haven’t previously been made public — including \~70 pages of memos compiled by Ilya Sutskever and 200+ pages of private notes kept by Dario Amodei. The piece covers a lot of ground. Some of what’s in it: ∙ The specific concerns that led the board to fire Altman in 2023. Sutskever’s memos allege a pattern of deception about safety protocols. One begins with a list: “Sam exhibits a consistent pattern of . . .” The first item is “Lying.” ∙ The superalignment team was publicly promised 20% of compute. People who worked on the team say actual resources were 1-2%, on the oldest hardware. The team was dissolved without completing its mission. When reporters asked to interview OpenAI researchers working on existential safety, a company representative replied: “What do you mean by ‘existential safety’? That’s not, like, a thing.” ∙ After Altman’s reinstatement, the firm behind the Enron and WorldCom investigations was hired to review the allegations. No written report was ever produced. Findings were limited to oral briefings. ∙ In a tense call after his firing, the board pressed Altman to acknowledge a pattern of deception. “I can’t change my personality,” he said. A board member’s interpretation: “What it meant was ‘I have this trait where I lie to people, and I’m not going to stop.’” ∙ In OpenAI’s early years, executives discussed playing world powers including China and Russia against each other in a bidding war for AI. The company’s own policy adviser: “We’re talking about potentially the most destructive technology ever invented — what if we sold it to Putin?” The plan was dropped after employees threatened to quit. ∙ When Anthropic refused a Pentagon ultimatum to drop its prohibitions on autonomous weapons, Altman publicly claimed solidarity. But he’d been negotiating with the Pentagon for at least two days. That Friday, OpenAI announced a $50B deal integrating its models into military infrastructure. ∙ Multiple senior Microsoft executives described the relationship as “fraught.” One: “He has misrepresented, distorted, renegotiated, reneged on agreements.”