The Corporate Governance Failure at the Heart of Sam Altman’s Ouster from OpenAI

In this piece I examine both the flawed corporate structure of OpenAI, and the neglect of governance evolution during a year of immense change. Those things led to the chaos that is still unfolding around the firing of Sam Altman. I conclude that alternative governance structures aren’t the issue, as some may readily surmise. Nonetheless, how OpenAI’s particular structure was set up and managed left it vulnerable to calamity. Other alternative structures, such as those instituted by Anthropic, were more thoughtfully put together, better harmonize the interests of multiple stakeholders, and should be more resilient to slow divergences of goals or sudden organizational shocks.