Former OpenAI chief technology officer Mira Murati testified via video on Wednesday in the trial between Elon Musk and OpenAI, describing a dishonest leadership style from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and tension among board members during the firing of Altman.
Sam Altman, Chief Executive Officer of OpenAI, and Mira Murati, Chief Technology Officer of OpenAI, speak during The Wall Street Journal's WSJ Tech Live Conference in Laguna Beach, California on October 17, 2023. (Photo by Patrick T. Fallon / AFP) (Photo by PATRICK T. FALLON/AFP via Getty Images)
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Murati, who left OpenAI in 2024 to found AI startup Thinking Machines Lab (valued at $12 billion), testified following two days of testimony from OpenAI president Greg Brockman.
Asked about Altman’s leadership style, Murati said he was “not always” honest with her, undermined her as CTO and pit other OpenAI executives against each other.
Murati also described her experience when OpenAI board members fired Altman in November 2023, recounting how board members asked her to step into the CEO position while she stayed in close contact with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, as well as the “complete and utter chaos” surrounding the decision: “OpenAI was at catastrophic risk of falling apart. I was concerned about the company completely blowing up.”
When reinstated, Altman continued his leadership style including his pattern of delaying big decisions and telling different people different things based on what he thought they wanted to hear, creating a “very difficult and chaotic environment" to work in, Murati testified.
Murati joined OpenAI in 2018 and rose to chief technology officer, overseeing the company's engineering, research, product and safety teams while serving as the main point person for OpenAI's partnership with Microsoft. Microsoft has poured more than $13 billion into OpenAI since 2019, making it the ChatGPT maker's biggest investor and the company that provides the massive computing power OpenAI needs to build its models. In exchange, Microsoft got the rights to use OpenAI's technology in its own products, including Bing search, the Copilot assistant and its Azure cloud business. That tight relationship is at the heart of Musk's lawsuit, which argues OpenAI betrayed its original promise to be a nonprofit working for humanity's benefit and instead became, in effect, a profit engine for Microsoft. Murati helped negotiate three deals with Microsoft over the years, each one bringing the two companies closer together. In November 2023, OpenAI's board abruptly fired Altman and removed Brockman, briefly making Murati interim CEO before Altman returned days later, after hundreds of employees, including chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, signed a petition demanding it. Nadella publicly offered to hire Altman and any defecting OpenAI staff to Microsoft within days of the firing.
Murati testified that during the November 2023 chaos, she worried OpenAI's researchers would jump ship to rival AI labs, specifically Google's DeepMind, run by CEO Demis Hassabis, as well as xAI, the competitor Musk had launched just months earlier in July 2023. Keeping employees from defecting was such a pressing concern that rallying them around OpenAI's biggest partners, Microsoft and Salesforce, became a key part of Murati's plan to hold the company together, she said. On Monday, Brockman testified that the first thing he remembers Musk saying during their first encounter in 2015 is, “Is Demis Hassabis evil?” Musk testified last week that he cofounded OpenAI to create a "counterbalance to Google" on concerns about the company’s approach to AI safety.
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