Sam Altman Under SEC Investigation for Potentially Misleading Investors

Looks like Sam has more in common with Elon than either would care to admit.

Probalist Agenda

OpenAI and its embattled CEO, Sam Altman, are apparently being investigated by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) about statements made to the company's investors.

As the Wall Street Journal reports, the SEC is looking at emails, including those sent by and to Altman, as its investigators figure out whether the company's investors were misled during the November bloodbath that resulted in his ouster and subsequent reinstatement.

During the debacle that Microsoft employees referred to as the "Turkey-Shoot Clusterfuck," the company's board claimed when sacking Altman that he had not been "consistently candid in his communications" — only to reinstate him days later following an employee revolt, with a modified board that didn't include those that ousted him.

Now, it seems, the SEC is trying to figure out what happened there, and if OpenAI itself was, you know, "candid" in its own communications.

It's not the first time the government has come snooping around about that particular claim, either. As the WSJ reported in November, officials from the US attorney's office in Manhattan and other regulators began asking executives what they meant by that statement even as the coup was going down.

Dueling Investigations

The investigation, as the WSJ reports, is based in New York, where SEC officials have asked some senior OpenAI employees to preserve internal documents. This is common practice in these sorts of investigations, and as the newspaper's anonymous sources close to the probe say, so too is the agency's "predictable" desire to look into the matter.

News of this SEC investigation, which until now had not been made public, comes just a day after the New York Times reported that an internal investigation into Altman's ouster by the WilmerHale law firm is "nearing its end." The CEO himself has, apparently, been telling people that the company's probe will soon be over, and that its results could be presented to the OpenAI board in early March, according to people familiar with the matter who spoke to the NYT on condition of anonymity.

With leaks and tweets abounding, the public has still only gotten a piecemeal look into OpenAI's Thanksgiving drama — even as its products, including ChatGPT and its forthcoming text-to-video generator Sora, continue to make it the world's preeminent AI firm.

Now, it seems, the government may force OpenAI's hand in revealing more about the fiasco.

More on OpenAI investigations: OpenAI Hiring Detective to Find Who's Leaking Its Precious Info