Previously: OpenAI: Facts From a Weekend, OpenAI: The Battle of the Board, OpenAI: Leaks Confirm the Story, OpenAI: Altman Returns, OpenAI: The Board Expands.

Ilya Sutskever and Jan Leike have left OpenAI. This is almost exactly six months after Altman’s temporary firing and The Battle of the Board, the day after the release of GPT-4o, and soon after a number of other recent safety-related OpenAI departures. Many others working on safety have also left recently. This is part of a longstanding pattern at OpenAI.

Jan Leike later offered an explanation for his decision on Twitter. Leike asserts that OpenAI has lost the mission on safety and culturally been increasingly hostile to it. He says the superalignment team was starved for resources, with its public explicit compute commitments dishonored, and that safety has been neglected on a widespread basis, not only superalignment but also including addressing the safety needs of the GPT-5 generation of models.

Altman acknowledged there was much work to do on the safety front. Altman and Brockman then offered a longer response that seemed to say exactly nothing new.

Then we learned that OpenAI has systematically misled and then threatened its departing employees, forcing them to sign draconian lifetime non-disparagement agreements, which they are forbidden to reveal due to their NDA.

Altman has to some extent acknowledged this and promised to fix it once the allegations became well known, but so far there has been no fix implemented beyond an offer to contact him privately for relief.

These events all seem highly related.

Also these events seem quite bad.

What is going on?

This post walks through recent events and informed reactions to them.

The first ten sections address departures from OpenAI, especially Sutskever and Leike.

The next five sections address the NDAs and non-disparagement agreements.

Then at the end I offer my perspective, highlight another, and look to paths forward.

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Table of Contents

Stephen Fowler's Shortform

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Stephen Fowler's Shortform

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