In November 2023, OpenAI’s board fired CEO Sam Altman without warning. In just five days, the company behind ChatGPT went through two interim CEOs, nearly lost most of its staff to a mass walkout, and finally agreed to bring Altman back.
If you want to get to know the company first, start with What kind of company is OpenAI.
Who Is Sam Altman
Sam Altman is a co-founder and the CEO of OpenAI. He was previously president of the startup accelerator Y Combinator and helped found OpenAI in 2015. After ChatGPT took off in late 2022, he became the face of generative AI, so news of his firing shook the whole industry.
The Five Days That Rewrote OpenAI
All dates are November 2023, U.S. West Coast time.
| Time | What happened |
|---|---|
| 11/17 | The board fired Altman, saying he had “not been consistently candid in his communications with the board.” CTO Mira Murati became interim CEO; chairman Greg Brockman was removed as chairman and resigned the same day |
| 11/19 | Talks on Altman’s return collapsed; the board brought in Twitch co-founder Emmett Shear as the second interim CEO |
| Late 11/19–20 | Microsoft announced that Altman and Brockman would join Microsoft to lead a new AI team; more than 700 employees, about 95% of staff, signed a letter demanding the board resign and reinstate Altman, or they would leave en masse |
| Late 11/21 | The two sides reached an agreement in principle: Altman would return, with a new board of Bret Taylor (chair), Larry Summers, and Adam D’Angelo |
| 11/29 | Altman formally returned as CEO and Brockman as president; Microsoft gained a non-voting observer seat on the board |
Who Fired Him, and Why
Four directors voted to fire Altman: co-founder and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo, and independent directors Helen Toner and Tasha McCauley. Altman and Brockman did not take part in the vote.
The only reason the board gave publicly was that Altman had “not been consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities.” It never said which communications were the problem.
Why did the board have this power? At the time, OpenAI’s directors answered to the nonprofit mission, not to investors. The design was meant to keep governance free from commercial pressure, and it also let the board fire the CEO outright.
Ilya Sutskever’s Reversal
Sutskever was the key figure who brought the concerns into the open and voted to fire Altman. Three days later, he publicly said he “deeply regretted” his part in the board’s actions. He later left the board, departed OpenAI in May 2024, and founded Safe Superintelligence, a company focused on AI safety.
The Employee Revolt and Microsoft’s Backstop
What really turned things around was the employees. Even Murati, who had briefly been interim CEO, and Sutskever, who had voted to fire Altman, were on the list of signatories.
Microsoft was then OpenAI’s largest investor and cloud partner. CEO Satya Nadella brokered behind the scenes while publicly offering to take in Altman and the whole team. That made the employees’ threat to quit credible: if the board held firm, OpenAI could be left an empty shell.
The Finale: He Came Back, and the Board Was Overhauled
Toner, McCauley, and Sutskever, who had voted to fire Altman, all left the board; D’Angelo was the only old director to stay. As of October 2026, Altman is still OpenAI’s CEO.
The Aftermath: Independent Review and Governance Reform
The new board hired the law firm WilmerHale to run an independent review, which released a summary in March 2024:
- The firing came from a “breakdown in trust” between the prior board and Altman.
- The review explicitly ruled out product safety, development speed, company finances, and misstatements to investors or customers as causes.
- The prior board had the authority to make the decision, but Altman’s conduct “did not mandate removal”; the board acted hastily and gave him no chance to respond.
After the review, Altman rejoined the board, and OpenAI added directors, tightened its conflict-of-interest rules, and set up a whistleblower hotline.
In 2025, OpenAI completed a restructuring in which the nonprofit OpenAI Foundation controls the for-profit public benefit corporation OpenAI Group PBC. Many see the 2023 storm as one of the distant causes of this restructuring, because it showed how much control the nonprofit board held over the for-profit entity. This is an outside interpretation, not OpenAI’s official account. To see how the valuation and ownership structure evolved, read OpenAI Pre-IPO Deep Dive.
What Has Never Been Made Public
- What “not candid” actually means: The board never released its evidence, and WilmerHale published only a summary. Former director Helen Toner said in a 2024 interview that the board learned ChatGPT was about to launch from Twitter, but that is one director’s account, not an official finding.
- The “Q*” rumor: Reuters reported that before the firing, researchers wrote to the board warning of a research breakthrough code-named Q*. The report was single-source, OpenAI never confirmed it, and the independent review ruled out safety concerns, so it remains a rumor from the time.
Penchan’s summary
What these five days really tested was a governance design: a nonprofit board that answered to no investors yet held the power to fire, sitting on top of a company commercializing at full speed. The official review did not name “safety vs. commercialization” as the reason for the firing, but that structural tension was the backdrop to the storm. The 2025 restructuring that rearranged control was a step OpenAI was almost bound to take sooner or later.
Further reading: What kind of company is Anthropic. The safety camp that left OpenAI back then became its most direct rival.