A very long profile, and an even longer list of grievances
The New Yorker has published a 16,000-word feature on OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman that tries to answer a question increasingly asked in public: how trustworthy is he, really?
The piece cites multiple people who have accused Altman of being habitually dishonest. It also revisits several of the most heavily reported chapters in his career, including his abrupt ousting from OpenAI in 2023 and his rapid return, his long-running feud with Elon Musk, and the collapse of the carefully marketed image of Altman as an AI safety advocate putting humanity first.
That persona already required a generous suspension of disbelief. In the current version of events, it now sits beside a more profitable reality: Altman as a Trump-aligned industry power player who recently signed a deal with the US Department of War. The branding has changed, which is often what happens when a startup-era morality tale runs into scale and money.
The plan that reportedly went in the opposite direction
One of the most striking details in the article involves OpenAI’s internal thinking about global AI competition. According to the report, after former OpenAI policy adviser Page Hedley laid out ways to avoid a worldwide AI arms race, OpenAI president Greg Brockman suggested the reverse.
The New Yorker says the idea was that OpenAI could make money by setting major powers, including China and Russia, against one another, perhaps by pushing them into a bidding war.
Jack Clark, who was OpenAI’s policy director at the time and is now head of policy at Anthropic, described the concept as "a prisoner’s dilemma, where all of the nations need to give us funding" and where "not giving us funding" would be seen as dangerous.
If that sounds like the plot of a very bleak corporate thriller, that is because it does. Except this one involved actual policy, actual companies, and actual governments trying to decide whether the future should be regulated, monetized, or simply cornered first.
More than one story about Altman
The article does not stop at the alleged bidding-war idea. It also places OpenAI’s rise inside the broader AI boom, and treats Altman’s reputation among peers as a central part of the story. The result is a portrait of a company that has become one of the main symbols of the current AI bubble, and of a leader whose carefully managed image keeps running into inconvenient facts.
For readers interested in how OpenAI became so central to the industry, and how Altman came to be viewed with a mix of admiration, suspicion, and fatigue, the feature offers plenty of context. It also offers a reminder that the people shaping the AI race are not always being especially subtle about it.
The New Yorker piece is available online and in the magazine’s latest print edition.
