Former OpenAI board member explains why CEO Sam Altman got fired before he was rehired

Former OpenAI board member Helen Toner, who helped oust CEO Sam Altman in November, broke her silence when she spoke on a podcast released Tuesday about events inside the company leading up to Altman's firing.

One example she gave: When OpenAI released ChatGPT in November 2022, the board was not informed in advance and found out about it on Twitter. Toner also said Altman did not tell the board he owned the OpenAI startup fund.

Altman was renamed CEO less than a week after he was fired, but Toner's comments give insight into the decision for the first time.

"The board is a nonprofit board that was set up explicitly for the purpose of making sure that the company's public good mission was primary, was coming first — over profits, investor interests, and other things," Toner said on "The TED AI Show" podcast.

"But for years, Sam had made it really difficult for the board to actually do that job by withholding information, misrepresenting things that were happening at the company, in some cases outright lying to the board," she said.

Toner said Altman gave the board "inaccurate information about the small number of formal safety processes that the company did have in place" on multiple occasions.

"For any individual case, Sam could always come up with some kind of innocuous-sounding explanation of why it wasn't a big deal, or misinterpreted, or whatever," Toner said. "But the end effect was that after years of this kind of thing, all four of us who fired him came to the conclusion that we just couldn't believe things that Sam was telling us, and that's just a completely unworkable place to be in as a board — especially a board that is supposed to be providing independent oversight over the company, not just helping the CEO to