{"id":10018,"date":"2026-04-06T20:10:00","date_gmt":"2026-04-06T20:10:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/sources-sam-altman-sociopath\/"},"modified":"2026-04-06T20:10:00","modified_gmt":"2026-04-06T20:10:00","slug":"sources-sam-altman-sociopath","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/sources-sam-altman-sociopath\/","title":{"rendered":"Inside Sources Say Sam Altman Is a Sociopath"},"content":{"rendered":"
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You don\u2019t build a trillion dollar AI empire by being a saint.<\/p>\n

In a seeping new investigative piece from The New Yorker<\/em><\/a>, numerous tech insiders paint a picture of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman as a relentless liar who wants everyone to like him while manipulating even the people closest to him to get what he wants. AI safety, in this slippery portrait of Altman, is merely a bargaining chip he dangles like a carrot to get concerned engineers \u2014 and anyone else worried about the tech\u2019s far-reaching consequences \u2014 on board, before going back on his word.<\/p>\n

Some of these insiders were strikingly blunt in their diagnoses: Altman was a literal \u201csociopath,\u201d one OpenAI board member alleged.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe\u2019s unconstrained by truth,\u201d they told The<\/em> New Yorker<\/em>. \u201cHe 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Aaron Swartz, the famed coder and hacktivist who died by suicide in 2013, used similar language to describe Altman. Swartz had been batchmates with Altman in the inaugural class of 2005 at the Silicon Valley incubator Y Combinator, and warned his friends about Altman shortly before his passing.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou need to understand that Sam can never be trusted,\u201d he told one confidante. \u201cHe is a sociopath. He would do anything.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Altman, it\u2019s worth noting, has been accused by his sister in a civil suit<\/a> of repeatedly sexually abusing her beginning when she was three-year-old and when he was 12. Altman, his mother, and his brothers all deny the claims.<\/p>\n

The New Yorker <\/em>piece characterizes Altman as more of a businessman than an engineer, leveraging an almost singular ability to get skeptics, be they engineers or the public, to believe that he holds the same priorities as them.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe\u2019s unbelievably persuasive. Like, Jedi mind tricks,\u201d a tech executive who has worked with Altman told The<\/em> New Yorker<\/em>. \u201cHe\u2019s just next level.\u201d<\/p>\n

One alleged victim of Altman\u2019s double dealing is Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who used to work at OpenAI but left to found his own safety-focused AI company over differences with Altman.<\/p>\n

In notes viewed by The New Yorker, <\/em>Amodei wrote about negotiating a billion-dollar investment from Microsoft in 2019. Many at the company were reportedly anxious that Microsoft would override OpenAI\u2019s safety commitments, and Amodei made sure to address this by showing Altman a ranked list of safety demands, which Altman agreed to. But when the deal was closing in June, Amodei discovered a provision had been added that obviated the top demand on the list. Amodei confronted Altman about this, but Altman denied the provision existed, even after Amodei read the provision aloud to him.<\/p>\n

Another is Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. Multiple executives at the Redmond giant described Altman as repeatedly going back on his word, straining his long-standing relationship with Nadella. \u201cHe has misrepresented, distorted, renegotiated, reneged on agreements,\u201d one executive told The New Yorker<\/em>. An example from earlier this year: on the same day OpenAI reaffirmed Microsoft as the exclusive provider for its memoryless AI models, it announced a $50 billion deal with Amazon<\/a> as its exclusive reseller of its \u201cFrontier\u201d platform for AI agents. (Microsoft signalled it was willing to sue over this alleged breach of contract<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

Sue Yoon, a former OpenAI board member dished a slightly different, but no less unflattering, view of Altman than the \u201csociopath\u201d picture. Altman was \u201cnot this Machiavellian villain,\u201d she said, but was able to delude himself to in believing his ever-shifting sales pitches. \u201cHe\u2019s too caught up in his own self-belief,\u201d she told The New Yorker<\/em>. \u201cSo he does things that, if you live in the real world, make no sense. But he doesn\u2019t live in the real world.\u201d<\/p>\n

More on OpenAI:<\/strong> Sam Altman Watches Awkwardly As He\u2019s Shown Bizarre ChatGPT Issue<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

The post Inside Sources Say Sam Altman Is a Sociopath<\/a> appeared first on Futurism<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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You don\u2019t build a trillion dollar AI empire by being a saint. In a seeping new investigative piece from The New Yorker, numerous tech insiders paint a picture of OpenAI…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[177,179],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10018","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-artificial-intelligence","category-openai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10018","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10018"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10018\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10018"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10018"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10018"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}