I've recently updated & added new information to my posts about the claims of Sam Altman's sister, Annie Altman, in which Annie alleges that Sam sexually abused her when she was a child. 

I have made many updates to my post since I originally published it back in October 2023, so depending on when you last read my post (which is now a series of 11 posts, since the original got so long (144,510 words) that it was causing the LessWrong editor & my browser to lag & crash when I tried to edit it), there may be a substantial amount of information I've added that is new to you.

Over the past few days, I've added in portions of transcripts from the 153 podcast episodes that Annie has published on her podcast. I found them quite worrying and disturbing, unfortunately. In her podcast episodes, which Annie published throughout 2018-2025, Annie has talked about:

- wanting to kill herself as a child, in association with having an extreme fear of death (leading to a variety of downstream mental health problems), a strong desire to control whether or not she died, and emotional distress over not being able to control when she might die
- "from a young age, definitely would be very focused on the fact that we're not all going to be here -- when I was really little, actually, I had a compulsive thing to tell my parents I love them every night before bedtime because I was afraid they would die in the middle of the night, or if in case the last thing I told them had to be, I love you"
- fear of/discomfort with change beginning at a young age
- being an "overthinking" three year old
- at a young age, going vegetarian and imposing a plethora of food rules upon herself and her eating in order to satisfy her strong desire to control her life, and "having one older brother who wasn't knowing about it"
- having multiple eating disorders, and going through cycles of restricting and bingeing with food & eating
- when she grew older, not remembering well parts of her childhood that her mother would tell stories about
- smoking weed
- her interest in astrology, and her more general interest in frameworks that help her put labels on things and people
- a mix of scientific and pseudo-scientific ideas/frameworks
- teaching and doing yoga
- crying while doing yoga poses, specifically while stretching/working her hips in Pigeon Pose
- health issues, e.g. with Annie's Achilles tendon (and other tendons), ovarian cysts, walking boot, etc.
- Anine's feelings, emotions, and mind-body connection
- "not having words for feelings"
- being stuck in extremist, black-and-white thinking patterns
- having a disordered central nervous system, emotional "spikes"
- persistent desires for safety and control
- having OCD (Obsessive–compulsive disorder)
- struggling with internal voices in her head shaming her (which she seems to have traced back to the shaming she received from her mother as a child)
- feeling like she has many internal child-like "internal parts", or an "inner child"
- beginning in ~2020-2021: occasionally talking about going no-contact with her relatives (i.e. her 3 brothers and her mother)
- being told to not share "family secrets"
- participating in "women's circles...where someone shares whatever they want to share and no one says a damn thing. No one says a word. There's no response."
- trauma, and flight-fight, freeze, or fawn reactions
- doing EMDR (Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing)
- doing sex work and sex therapy
- being homeless, houseless, and low on money or in "survival mode" for extended periods
- more specific (and saddening/concerning) details about the 2 sexual assaults Annie claims she experienced 
- etc.

I still have to think about all of this more. For now, a few quick/unpolished thoughts of mine:

- Annie has been quite self-consistent over a long period of time. To me, her claims have indeed changed from (e.g.) 2017 to 2025, but not in a "pervasively contradict each other" way, more in a "Annie seems to have slowly settled upon certain explanations for strange experiences and behaviors in her personal life that she didn't understand for a long time" way.

- In her podcast episodes, Annie does talk about smoking weed, astrology, and a mix of scientific and pseudo-scientific ideas. This does undermine her credibility a bit, I think. I personally don't believe in astrology, smoke weed, or believe in pseudo-scientific ideas. But I have read through (transcripts of) >200 hours worth of Annie's podcasts, and to me, Annie doesn't seem "nuts", "insane", "delusional", or anything like that.


I do want to note that this, and my 11 posts, are just my personal opinion/views. I always feel sorta weird about having "the" post(s) on LessWrong about Annie Altman's claims. From what I can tell, my posts have received quite a lot of downvotes, and the majority of the upvotes I received on my original (now "Part 1") post were on earlier versions of my post (from 2023 to early 2024), so I hope my posts don't give the false impression of being "what LessWrong thinks about the situation", or something like that. I've spent a lot of time compiling and reading through the information in my posts, but I think there many people who are smarter and/or more rational than me who will be able to think about this information better than I can. I neither claim nor want a monopoly on this information and its interpretation. 

Feel free to leave a comment or give feedback, criticism, etc. I may not be able to respond to everything immediately, and I may not have a great response for every comment, but I'll try my best.

Sorry for the delayed response - yes, I think this kind of gets at the heart of the matter. I think, though I did a pretty good job with being rational in this post, and trying to make rational, unbiased claims from/using the information that exists, I could have been a bit more refined and clear-cut.

I honestly feel a bit bad, because this is an important issue, and I hope I didn't screw things up by (unintentionally) presenting things in a irrational or biased way. I'll try to be very rational and unbiased in this comment.

I think my statement that I was "trying to figure out the truth" in an earlier comment was misguided and imprecise. You were keen to notice this. In a situation like this, there are large amounts of uncertainty, and there is currently no proof of misconduct (that I've seen.)

I think what this post does is {provide a (relatively) accurate description of the state of affairs regarding Annie's claims.} I do feel pretty good about the way in which I presented the information relevant to this matter in this post. Though I don't want to necessarily "take shots" at Elizabeth Weil, whose nymag article provided basically the only significant written third-party acknowledgment of Annie's claims, I will say that I prefer the (hopefully, more) objective, straight-from-the-source, uncertainty-acknowledging approach I've taken here.

The key thing here is that, currently, the primary information we have is:

1. Claims that Annie has made on social media, as well as a few pictures of her from when she was sick that she took, and a few screenshots of her social media that potentially indicate, but do not provably or definitively, indicate that she experienced shadowbanning, let alone that the low engagement/shadowbanning occured because of Sam. It is important to avoid the conjunction fallacy:
   
   Let A = the event that Annie Altman, or (digital) media relating to her did indeed experience shadowbanning, low engagement, etc.
   Let B = the event that Sam Altman caused A to occur.
   
   Then
   P(A ∧ B) ≤ P(A).
   
   To me, it seems very hard to prove that one has been shadowbanned. To me, this would require proof of an arrangement between a "shadowbanning-requester" (e.g. Sam Altman) and the "shadowbanners" (e.g. developers or mods at Instagram, X, etc.), or direct evidence of actions taken and/or code written by mods, devs, etc. that shadowbanned Annie's content. In this matter, that has not been provided.
    
2. A 2018 podcast episode that Annie did with Sam, Jack, and Max. Yes, while it is potentially suspicious that Sam cut Annie off around 24:50 ish, it doesn't prove anything. 
3. A Twitter post from 2018 where Sam Altman shared a link to Annie's Youtube channel.
4. A variety of other social media posts from Annie that, while they are not inconsistent with the story she is telling / claims she is making about Sam, do not provide proof for the claims she has made about Sam.
   1. For example, Annie seems to have posted multiple social media posts showing her in Hawai'i at the times that she claims she was. So this does corroborate the part of the larger claim-story in which Annie claims she was in Hawai'i at time X. However, these only support that individual part of her story; they provide no evidence for anything else.

So, I think the main thing that this post has going for it is that it aggregates what is out there in a relatively objective/unbiased way. That is, it aggregates (many of) the claims Annie has made, and related media that exists on the Internet. 

My mistake. Fixed it. Thanks for pointing that out!

I think you make multiple valid points which are similar to the points I've made in my post, but I do think our stances differ in a few ways.

I think that you are certainly correct that psychosis, or a similar type of mental illness / disorder, is a plausible explanatory hypothesis for Annie making the claims that she has. 

However, though I do recognize that the simplicity of a hypothesis is a boon to its plausibility, I do not share your belief that we have been unknowingly subsumed by the "MeToo world order", which has damaged our rationalism and obstructed our ability to recognize this as being obviously the simplest hypothesis. (Though perhaps this is a overly dramatic / inaccurate representation of your assertion.)

While I do agree that this post may encapsulate behavior representative of a person suffering from psychosis, or a similar mental illness, I see the hypothesis space as primarily dual, where mental illness / misrepresentation-of-reality-type hypotheses form one primary subspace, but there exists another primary subspace wherein the behavior detailed in this post is indeed representative of a person who has gone through the things which Annie has claimed she has.

I do appreciate your inclusion of quantitative rates; I think your analysis benefits from it.

Thanks! 

Actually, right now, I believe that, based upon the information I currently have, it is improper for me to conclude that Sam Altman abused Annie Altman, and that the proper stance is I do not know if Annie Altman's claims are correct or not; therefore, it is only rational to hold Sam Altman innocent.

However -- I'm in the process of gathering more information. Once I've conducted research to a degree I consider satisfactory, I'd be happy to hear your reasoning if, at that point, our conclusions disagree. For now, I'll suggest that you wait until I finish up my research, though feel free to ignore this suggestion if you want :) 

The points you make are valid. You also make a good point about the importance of additional context. 

I think I may have miscommunicated myself to some extent, based on the fact that I largely agree with your reply here.

The most clear, and most general framing of my motives is this:

1. My overarching, most fundamental desire is for humanity to have a positive AI future.
2. Because of this, I want to do my best to determine the validity of a claim(s) such as Annie's that asserts that the CEO of the world's (leading) artificial intelligence company / research org / lab / whatever you want to call it may actually be a person of highly questionable morals. The whole reason we got OpenAI in the first place is, apparently, because Elon freaked out when Larry Page called him a 'specist' back in 2013. (I will not bother commenting on whether or not I think this was ultimately a good thing. ) I very much want the person leading the development of and (attempts at) alignment of superintelligence to be a good person. 
3. The reason I have made this post here is because of (2), not because I thought that this forum was the right place to worry about the mental health of Annie Altman. While obviously I am concerned for Annie Altman herself independent of my superintelligence / Sam Altman / OpenAI concerns, the reason why I am posting "about Annie" here on LessWrong is because of the potential ramifications of what she is saying about Sam Altman. This isn't an "Annie Altman post"; it's a "Sam Altman post" where Annie Altman is the conduit.

Hopefully this framing of mine is more reasonable. And thank you for the compliment - I am trying my best to conduct myself rationally :)

My motivation is pure. I am trying to (rationally) figure out the truth. Though, I'd be epistemologically naive if I expected you to believe me just because I told you "I'm a good person, trust me!".

Also -- I could care less about what people opine (without backing logical/rational arguments.) I could have chosen to do a big long rant with a bunch of clickbait-y quips and half-truthisms on X to try to jack up engagement and suck ad revenue out of X like a leach, but luckily I'm not an asshole (in my humble opinion, lol), so I came here instead. (Not to imply that you said that; I just say this more in an attempt to convey my motives and character.) I came to this site in particular because:

1. I thought its users would probably understand the significance of a claim that Sam Altman has been quietly hiding the fact that he sexually assaulted his 4-year-old sister.
2. I thought that its users would be good at calling me out on any logical/irrational bullshit that I (unintentionally) propagated. I want to be right, not to feel right. Say what you will about LessWrong, but its users do love to be quite exacting in their arguments about whether or not they think a person is making rational arguments. Indeed, I've modified this post, and my replies, many times in response to comments I've received in a way that I think has been to the benefit of the clarity of this post and its conveyance of my position. I'm glad that my karma score has jumped all over the place as I've updated my post - it means that LessWrong users are actually thinking critically about the degree to which I am being rational. 

It seems to me, at this point, one of two things is true:

1. Annie Altman is lying left, right,. and center, or is deluded, disconnected from reality, or just misinformed/misunderstanding things to the point that she believes she is telling the truth when she is not.
2. She is not lying (at least, to some degree.)

Yes, I know we can wonder about base rates and what mental illness we think she may likely have or not have. And such discussions are valid. But I am more interested in (more) concrete research, at the moment, which I'm still working on.

This post is not yet done.

Btw., you don't have to agree with my (developing) interpretations here. The thing I think is most relevant about this post is the collection of information I've assembled, which has nothing to do with my interpretation of it.

Update: While I don't consider this evidence of a widespread shadowbanning effort, some commenters on Hacker News claim that a post regarding Annie's claims that Sam sexually assaulted her at age 4 has been being repeatedly removed. 

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37785072
2. https://twitter.com/JOSourcing/status/1710390512455401888

I have updated this post to include this information as well (c.f. item 3.a. in "What Annie has stated on her X account.")

Good point. I don't currently know that rate, but agree that it would be helpful in analyzing this matter.