The week before Thanksgiving 2023 was the most chaotic moment in AI corporate history: Sam Altman was fired as OpenAI's CEO on November 17th, then reinstated five days later after nearly the entire company threatened to resign. The board's official explanation was that Altman was "not consistently candid in his communications with the board" - a statement thin enough to generate years of speculation about what actually happened behind closed doors.
New details are now emerging through the Musk v. Altman lawsuit. Mira Murati, who was OpenAI's Chief Technology Officer at the time and briefly became interim CEO during the days of uncertainty that followed the firing, gave a deposition that is now part of the public trial record. The Verge has reviewed the testimony and trial exhibits, surfacing an inside account of those five days from someone who was directly in the middle of them.
Elon Musk filed his lawsuit against Altman and OpenAI alleging the company had drifted from its founding mission as a nonprofit focused on safe AI development. Musk was an early backer and board member before departing in 2018. The lawsuit has become an unlikely public archive of OpenAI's internal history, with depositions from key figures producing documents that would otherwise never surface.
For businesses and developers who've built on ChatGPT and OpenAI's API, the governance questions raised by November 2023 aren't purely historical. OpenAI's unusual structure - a nonprofit board controlling a for-profit entity - was clearly under serious strain during that period. The company has since moved to restructure toward a more conventional for-profit model, and understanding what drove the 2023 crisis helps explain why those changes were deemed necessary. More documents and testimony are expected as the trial continues.