New Kelsey Piper article and twitter thread on OpenAI equity & non-disparagement.

It has lots of little things that make OpenAI look bad. It further confirms that OpenAI threatened to revoke equity unless employees signed the non-disparagement agreements Plus it shows Altman's signature on documents giving the company broad power over employees' equity — perhaps he doesn't read every document he signs, but this one seems quite important. This is all in tension with Altman's recent tweet that "vested equity is vested equity, full stop" and "i did not know this was happening." Plus "we have never clawed back anyone's vested equity, nor will we do that if people do not sign a separation agreement (or don't agree to a non-disparagement agreement)" is misleading given that they apparently regularly threatened to do so (or something equivalent — let the employee nominally keep their PPUs but disallow them from selling them) whenever an employee left.

Great news:

OpenAI told me that “we are identifying and reaching out to former employees who signed a standard exit agreement to make it clear that OpenAI has not and will not cancel their vested equity and releases them from nondisparagement obligations”

(Unless "employees who signed a standard exit agreement" is doing a lot of work — maybe a substantial number of employees technically signed nonstandard agreements.)

I hope to soon hear from various people that they have been freed from their nondisparagement obligations.

Update: OpenAI says:

As we shared with employees today, we are making important updates to our departure process. We have not and never will take away vested equity, even when people didn't sign the departure documents. We're removing nondisparagement clauses from our standard departure paperwork, and we're releasing former employees from existing nondisparagement obligations unless the nondisparagement provision was mutual. We'll communicate this message to former employees. We're incredibly sorry that we're only changing this language now; it doesn't reflect our values or the company we want to be.

[Low-effort post; might have missed something important.]

[Substantively edited after posting.]