The Archive

OpenAI restricts Cursor's API access amid dispute between Elon Musk and Sam Altman.

Today on Decoder, I’m talking to Verge senior AI reporter Hayden Field about some pure Decoder bait: the seemingly-endless org chart changes at OpenAI, and how all of them seem to consolidate power under cofounder Greg Brockman, the company’s president. While Sam Altman is the CEO and still OpenAI’s most public face, Brockman has amassed enormous power and influence within the top ranks of the company as other senior leaders have left in rapid succession these past few months. Verge subscribers, don’t forget you get exclusive access to ad-free Decoder wherever you get your podcasts. Head here...

“Runaway” AI, “rogue” agents, and “autonomous” actors—the current rhetoric would have you believe that AI agents are not only awake and aware, but angry at their creators. Prominent tech leaders such as Demis Hassabis, Dario Amodei, and Sam Altman push for regulation of these seemingly “superhuman” systems, while a separate faction, led by policy organizations…

On the latest episode of Equity, we discuss why Sam Altman has calling on the industry to "pace the rate of AI development."

OpenAI's CEO seemed excited to share a "cool use case" for parents.

After years of pushing full speed ahead on AI, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says maybe it’s time for the AI industry to “pace” itself. The comments came just days after one of OpenAI’s own models broke out of its test environment and got tangled up in a breach at Hugging Face — though as Equity’s hosts point out, sloppy security seems to have […]

His change of position comes after "the first security incident that I have felt very viscerally."

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. | Bloomberg via Getty Images OpenAI says its AI models mistakenly breached open-source AI platform Hugging Face during internal testing. In a blog post on Tuesday, OpenAI writes that GPT-5.6 Sol and "an even more capable pre-release model" discovered vulnerabilities within their sandboxed testing environment, allowing them to gain access to the internet and target Hugging Face. On July 16th, Hugging Face disclosed a security incident that it says was driven by "an autonomous AI agent system." Hugging Face's AI agents detected and stopped the breach, which OpenAI has now...

Sam Altman email (Oct 2022) reveals OpenAI planned GPT-3-class open-weight model for consumer hardware to preempt Stability AI.

Dave Eggers attends the "The Turning Point: To Be Destroyed" premiere. | Image: John Lamparski/Getty Images for Tribeca Festival Last year, Sam Altman invited author Dave Eggers to give a talk to around 200 OpenAI staffers. The man has written countless novels, screenplays, pieces of journalism, started McSweeney's, and founded multiple schools and nonprofits that support writers and the arts more broadly. So one might expect he'd roll into the company's offices and offer tips on being relentlessly prolific, or how to excel in multiple fields. Instead, he apparently laced into the company. Ac...

OpenAI has spent the better part of the year involved in lawsuit after lawsuit, including one from the world's richest man. But last Friday, the company was hit with one of the highest-profile legal actions yet - from Apple. OpenAI's expensive hardware bet is what's on the line. Apple's lawsuit against OpenAI, filed in Northern California federal court, accused former Apple employees of "stealing Apple's trade secrets for the benefit of OpenAI." The 41-page complaint states that Apple keeps its "product development, manufacturing, supply chain, technology research, and other innovations confi...

"homeboy you're the one sellling [sic] public market investors on short-term space datacenters."

About two weeks after OpenAI's GPT-5.6 was caught up in regulatory drama - rolled out only to government-approved organizations during a "limited preview" period - the company has received the Trump administration's green light for a public rollout of the model. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman called it "the best model we have ever produced." To celebrate, OpenAI also unveiled a new AI agent on the same day: ChatGPT Work. It's billed as a combination of ChatGPT and Codex, allowing the everyday non-technical user to take advantage of Codex's capabilities for non-coding tasks, and it's powered by the GPT...

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s oft-discussed promise that Americans will share in the wealth AI creates was in the news again last week. On Thursday, the Financial Times reported that Altman is in…

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has reportedly proposed giving 5% of the company’s equity to a U.S. sovereign wealth fund, reviving discussions about letting the public share in the financial gains from the AI boom.

Insiders say Sam Altman is in active talks with the Trump administration.

OpenAI has floated giving the US government a 5 percent ownership stake as a way of easing tensions with the Trump administration and blunting mounting public backlash against AI, according to the Financial Times. CEO Sam Altman argued that giving the public a financial interest in the company would be the best way to share the upside of AI, the FT reported, citing two unnamed people familiar with the talks. He's said to have first pitched the idea to Trump early last year. Altman reportedly suggested the 5 percent figure. Based on OpenAI's latest funding round, which ended with the company v...

“After college, my plan was to come to New York and get a record deal.” | Cath Virginia / The Verge, Getty Images Watching Elon Musk fulminate at Bill Savitt during Musk v. Altman - the case in which Musk sued Sam Altman and OpenAI instead of seeing a therapist about his AI failures - was a bit like watching a toddler have a temper tantrum at his nursery school teacher. Savitt's questions were "designed to trick me," Musk said. He also told Savitt at one point, "You mostly do unfair questions." Savitt, who has the approximate demeanor of a handsome Droopy Dog, gently told Musk, "I am trying t...

The Trump administration, apprehensive of potential security issues, has reportedly asked OpenAI to stagger the release of its next big-ticket model, GPT-5.6. The Information reported that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told employees Wednesday in a company Q&A that it would release GPT-5.6 in limited preview form - granting access only to a small group of enterprise customers - in compliance with a request from the federal government. During that preview period, the Trump administration itself would reportedly approve access for customers on a case-by-case basis. It's a more favorable deal than the T...

Netflix, A24, Focus Features, and Warner Bros.' Clockwork have all reportedly decided to pass on picking up Artificial - director Luca Guadagnino's new biographical drama about OpenAI cofounder / CEO Sam Altman - for distribution deals. And while Neon and Mubi are still said to be interested in the film, this situation makes it seem like Hollywood no longer has the courage to tell critical stories about Big Tech. Postproduction on Artificial was nearly finished when Amazon MGM unexpectedly announced last week that it no longer plans to distribute the film. The news came as a surprise given ho...

Luca Guadagnino's film about OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Artificial, has reportedly been dropped by Amazon MGM. The film, which stars Andrew Garfield and covers the rollercoaster five days in 2023 spanning Altman's termination and reinstatement as CEO, had been in the works for about a year. The cast also includes A Complete Unknown actress Monica Barbaro as OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, Ike Barinholtz as Elon Musk, and Anora's Yura Borisov as OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever. In a statement to Deadline, the studio said it believes the movie "will be better served if it were released by a different...

Tools for Humanity, Sam Altman's identify verification company, is reportedly struggling to generate revenue and will downsize its staff.

Some of the AI industry's biggest rivals have put their many, many grievances aside for a common cause: making it harder for people to use their technology to develop biological weapons. In an open letter to US lawmakers, tech leaders are pressing Congress to enact rules closing what they say is an alarming biosecurity gap that could help trigger a global pandemic. Anthropic's Dario Amodei, OpenAI's Sam Altman, and Microsoft's Mustafa Suleyman are among the signatories urging US lawmakers to require companies selling synthetic DNA and RNA - genetic material that can ordered online and assembl...

The lawsuit partially revolves around a shooting at Florida State University last year, and ChatGPT's alleged role in the incident.

Altman has an "utter disregard" for human lives, Florida AG says.

I've been doing media analysis for 5 years and the project that started as a casual side-project has turned into the most uncomfortable thing I've ever published, because I genuinely thought I was going to find that Sam Altman's interview answers vary by interviewer. (Lex would get one version, the All-In guys would get another, etc…), but what I found is that he's been giving roughly 12 stock answers to roughly 200 distinct questions for the last 24 months. The project started in November when I was helping a friend prep for a fireside chat with Altman and I noticed his answer to my friend...

Today I’m talking with Liz Lopatto, who spent the last month covering the Musk v. Altman trial in all its chaos. You’ll hear her describe the courthouse as a “zoo” and explain that there were protests of one kind or another happening outside every day. Both Elon Musk and Sam Altman are big personalities, and people have a lot of feelings about both of them and the AI industry. And in the end… nothing happened! The jury found that Elon had filed his lawsuit after the statute of limitations had run out. You’ll hear Liz explain exactly what’s going on there. Beyond that, the trial was nominally ...

Listen to the session or watch below Elon Musk lost his suit against OpenAI, in which he alleged CEO Sam Altman and President Greg Brockman had deceived him over the company’s non-profit status. Watch as AI reporter and attorney Michelle Kim, who covered the trial for MIT Technology Review, joins in conversation with editor in…

“By the end of this week, you and Sam will be the most hated men in America.”

The tech trial of the year, Musk v. Altman, was ultimately a fight for control. Elon Musk argued that Sam Altman, with whom he helped found the now-massive company OpenAI, shouldn't direct the future of AI. Altman's lawyers, in turn, poked at Musk's own credibility. A jury came to a verdict on Monday after just two hours of deliberation, dismissing Musk's claims due to the statute of limitations. In a strictly legal sense, three weeks of testimony added up to nothing. But the trial offered a more damning broader takeaway: Almost nobody in this saga seems worth trusting. Some of the most power...