Former OpenAI Employee Rages Against Sam Altman: "Person of Low Integrity"

Them's fightin' words.

Silent Riot

A former OpenAI employee is joining Elon Musk's campaign against CEO Sam Altman — and he's got a lot to say about his former boss.

After jumping ship to Anthropic, which was cofounded by former OpenAI-ers over AI safety and ethics concerns, researcher Todor Markov is now claiming in a new legal filing that his ex-boss is, essentially, a really bad dude.

The root of Markov's complaint, as he explained in his portion of a lengthy amicus brief that also includes statements from 11 other former OpenAI employees, are Altman's alleged lies about non-disparagement agreements that staffers are forced to sign early in their time at the company.

Last year, the researcher discovered the existence of the clause that essentially made him and other departing employees give up their right to ever speak critically about OpenAI if they wanted to keep their vested equity in their multi-billion-dollar former employer. During an all-hands meeting about the controversial clause, Altman claimed he had no knowledge of its existence — only to be caught with egg on his face immediately after when Vox published leaked documents showing that the CEO had signed off on it.

Lying Game

As Markov explained in his declaration, that debacle proved to him that Altman "was a person of low integrity who had directly lied to employees" about the restrictive non-disparagement agreements. This suggested to him that the CEO was "very likely lying to employees about a number of other important topics," including its commitment to building safe artificial general intelligence, or AGI.

In the company's charter, OpenAI promises to "use any influence we obtain over AGI's deployment to ensure it is used for the benefit of all, and to avoid enabling uses of AI or AGI that harm humanity or unduly concentrate power." According to Markov, that promise was "positioned as the foundational document guiding all of our strategic decisions" — but ultimately, it proved empty.

"I realized the Charter had been used as a smokescreen," he wrote, "something to attract and retain idealistic talent while providing no real check on OpenAI’s growth and its pursuit of AGI."

Like Musk, Markov believes that Altman's attempts to restructure OpenAI into a for-profit entity shows that its charter and mission "were used all along as a facade to manipulate its workforce and the public." Unlike that multi-hyphenate billionaire cofounder, however, the researcher isn't looking to buy anything — and seems mostly to want his voice heard.

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