On November 17, 2023, OpenAI’s board announced a “leadership transition.” In its own statement, the board said Sam Altman would depart as CEO and leave the board, that chief technology officer Mira Murati would serve as interim CEO, and that the board “no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI.” The stated reason was that the board “concluded that he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities.” It was a Friday.
The following days were chaotic. On November 19, Microsoft chairman and CEO Satya Nadella announced that Altman and co-founder Greg Brockman would join Microsoft to lead a new advanced AI research team. By November 22, OpenAI itself announced that Altman would return: the company said it had “reached an agreement in principle for Sam Altman to return to OpenAI as CEO with a new initial board of Bret Taylor (Chair), Larry Summers, and Adam D’Angelo.” In an updated statement, Nadella said Microsoft was “encouraged by the changes to the OpenAI board” and called them “a first essential step on a path to more stable, well-informed, and effective governance.” Of the directors who had fired Altman, only Adam D’Angelo remained.
The episode closed formally in March 2024. A Special Committee of the board had retained the law firm WilmerHale to review the events; OpenAI published the conclusions. WilmerHale “reviewed more than 30,000 documents” and “conducted dozens of interviews,” and “found there was a breakdown in trust between the prior Board and Mr. Altman that precipitated the events of November 17.” Critically, the review “concluded that the actions taken were not due to concerns about product safety, security, or finances.” Board chair Bret Taylor stated, “We have unanimously concluded that Sam and Greg are the right leaders for OpenAI.”
Whatever one’s view of the merits, the sequence is a governance failure: a nonprofit board fired the CEO of one of the most valuable companies in AI, could not hold the position for a week, and was itself replaced. This entry states only the documented sequence; the primary documents themselves do not specify the underlying conduct that triggered the loss of trust.
Note on sourcing: OpenAI’s own pages return an HTTP 403 error to automated fetchers, so the OpenAI statements (the November 17 leadership transition, the November 22 return announcement, and the March 2024 review summary) were corroborated through search against their canonical openai.com URLs, including OpenAI’s own X post announcing the agreement in principle. Microsoft’s Nadella statement was fetched and verified live.