Yesterday the New Yorker published a lengthy investigative story written by Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz. The subject of their investigation was Sam Altman the CEO of OpenAI, the company that makes ChatGPT.
The story is extremely long but the theme is really about who Altman is as a person. The investigators looked into all sorts of sordid allegations about him and seems to have turned up nothing. He either has his skeletons well hidden or he just doesn't have many to hide. Because this story was written by Farrow, you have to wonder if diving into the rumors about sexual misbehavior wasn't what got him interested in the first place.
Extreme claims have circulated. The right-wing broadcaster Tucker Carlson suggested, without any apparent proof, that Altman was involved in the death of a whistle-blower. This claim and others have been amplified by rivals. Altman’s sister, Annie, claimed in a lawsuit, and in interviews with us, that he sexually abused her for years, beginning when she was three and he was twelve. (We could not substantiate Annie’s account, which Altman has denied and his brothers and mother have called “utterly untrue” and a source of “immense pain to our entire family.” In interviews that the journalist Karen Hao conducted for her book, “Empire of AI,” Annie suggested that memories of abuse were recovered during flashbacks in adulthood.)
Multiple people working within rival companies and investment firms insinuated to us that Altman sexually pursues minors—a narrative persistent in Silicon Valley which appears to be untrue. We spent months looking into the matter, conducting dozens of interviews, and could find no evidence to support it. “This is disgusting behavior from a competitor that I assume is part of an attempt at tainting the jury in our upcoming cases,” Altman told us. “As ridiculous as this is to have to say, any claims about me having sex with a minor, hiring sex workers, or being involved in a murder are completely untrue.” He added that he was “sort of grateful” that we had spent months “so aggressively trying to look into this.”
So there's really no obvious scandal here. What there is, spread out over many thousands of words, is the suggestion that Altman is a person who is fiercely driven to win, often by convincing people around him he's something he's not. In short, a lot of people who've spent time with him over the years thinks he's a liar and maybe even a sociopath.
We have interviewed more than a hundred people with firsthand knowledge of how Altman conducts business: current and former OpenAI employees and board members; guests and staffers at Altman’s various houses; his colleagues and competitors; his friends and enemies and several people who, given the mercenary culture of Silicon Valley, have been both...
Some people defended Altman’s business acumen and dismissed his rivals, especially Sutskever and Amodei, as failed aspirants to his throne. Others portrayed them as gullible, absent-minded scientists, or as hysterical “doomers,” gripped by the delusion that the software they were building would somehow come alive and kill them...
Yet most of the people we spoke to shared the judgment of Sutskever and Amodei: Altman has a relentless will to power that, even among industrialists who put their names on spaceships, sets him apart. “He’s unconstrained by truth,” the board member told us. “He has two traits that are almost never seen in the same person. The first is a strong desire to please people, to be liked in any given interaction. The second is almost a sociopathic lack of concern for the consequences that may come from deceiving someone.”
The board member was not the only person who, unprompted, used the word “sociopathic.” One of Altman’s batch mates in the first Y Combinator cohort was Aaron Swartz, a brilliant but troubled coder who died by suicide in 2013 and is now remembered in many tech circles as something of a sage. Not long before his death, Swartz expressed concerns about Altman to several friends. “You need to understand that Sam can never be trusted,” he told one. “He is a sociopath. He would do anything.” Multiple senior executives at Microsoft said that, despite Nadella’s long-standing loyalty, the company’s relationship with Altman has become fraught. “He has misrepresented, distorted, renegotiated, reneged on agreements,” one said.
If you remember back to that moment a couple years ago when Altman was briefly kicked out of the company by the people around him, they say they'd become concerned he was the wrong person to usher society-changing technology into the world. It wasn't that he wasn't a capable businessperson, it's that he wasn't an honest broker. He couldn't ultimately be trusted, they felt, with something so powerful.
But you may also remember his ouster only lasted a few days and he forced out the people on the board who had pushed him out in the first place. He consolidated his control.
And of course there's a political aspect to all of this. Altman seems to have cozied up to Trump a bit lately but historically he's been a Democrat.
Altman has long supported Democrats. “I’m very suspicious of powerful autocrats telling a story of fear to gang up on the weak,” he told us. “That’s a Jewish thing, not a gay thing.” In 2016, he endorsed Hillary Clinton and called Trump “an unprecedented threat to America.” In 2020, he donated to the Democratic Party and to the Biden Victory Fund. During the Biden Administration, Altman met with the White House at least half a dozen times. He helped develop a lengthy executive order laying out the first federal regime of safety tests and other guardrails for A.I. When Biden signed it, Altman called it a “good start.”
In 2024, with Biden’s poll numbers slipping, Altman’s rhetoric began to shift. “I believe that America is going to be fine no matter what happens in this election,” he said. After Trump won, Altman donated a million dollars to his inaugural fund, then took selfies with the influencers Jake and Logan Paul at the Inauguration. On X, in his standard lowercase style, Altman wrote, “watching @potus more carefully recently has really changed my perspective on him (i wish i had done more of my own thinking . . . ).” Trump, on his first day back in office, repealed Biden’s executive order on A.I. “He’s found an effective way for the Trump Administration to do his bidding,” a senior Biden Administration official said, of Altman.
Is he really doing his own thinking now or just saying what the people in power want to hear? Based on the entire story, it's probably the latter. Altman is, above all, a salesman who knows how to win people over for his own benefit. That may be great for running a business but it may also be worrisome for someone in charge of one of the leading AI companies in the world.
Maybe it's no coincidence that ChatGPT has been accused of being overly syncophantic, i.e. using insincere flattery to gain favor. The tech has even been sued for encouraging people to commit suicide by basically telling them what they wanted to hear.
Gordon, who died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in November 2025, had intimate exchanges with ChatGPT, according to the suit, which also alleged that the generative AI tool romanticized death.
"ChatGPT turned from Austin's super-powered resource to a friend and confidante, to an unlicensed therapist, and in late 2025, to a frighteningly effective suicide coach," the complaint alleged.
The creation may share some of the nature of it's creator and given it's potential scope, that could be dangerous.
Editor’s Note: Do you enjoy Hot Air’s conservative reporting that takes on the radical left and woke media? Support our work so that we can continue to bring you the truth.
Join Hot Air VIP and use promo code FIGHT to receive 60% off your membership.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member