All posts tagged: Sam Altman

Sam Altman responds to ‘incendiary’ New Yorker article after attack on his home

Sam Altman responds to ‘incendiary’ New Yorker article after attack on his home

Published by skeptic

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman published a blog post on Friday evening responding to both an apparent attack on his home and an in-depth New Yorker profile raising questions about his trustworthiness. Early Friday morning, someone allegedly threw a Molotov cocktail at Altman’s San Francisco home. No one was hurt in the incident, and a suspect was later arrested at OpenAI headquarters, where he was threatening to burn down the building, according to the SF Police Department. While the police have not identified the suspect publicly, Altman noted that the incident came a few days after “an incendiary article” was published about him. He said someone had suggested that the article’s publication “at a time of great anxiety about AI” could make things “more dangerous” for him. “I brushed it aside,” Altman said. “Now I am awake in the middle of the night and pissed, and thinking that I have underestimated the power of words and narratives.” The article in question was a lengthy investigative piece written by Ronan Farrow (who won a Pulitzer for reporting …

Sam Altman Confirms Molotov Cocktail Incident in Personal Blog Post

Sam Altman Confirms Molotov Cocktail Incident in Personal Blog Post

Published by Daniella Wilson

San Francisco police arrested an individual on Friday after they allegedly threw a Molotov cocktail at the home of OpenAI’s Sam Altman and made threats outside his company’s headquarters. No injuries were reported, per OpenAI, which confirmed the incident in a statement, adding, “We deeply appreciate how quickly SFPD responded and the support from the city in helping keep our employees safe. The individual is in custody, and we’re assisting law enforcement with their investigation.” View our latest statement regarding an incident that occurred early this morning at a North Beach residence. Officers have made an arrest, and no injuries were reported as a result of this incident. pic.twitter.com/t4DsF31uxh — San Francisco Police (@SFPD) April 10, 2026 Hours later, Altman himself confirmed the incident by way of a personal blog post seemingly sparked by both the shock of the Molotov incident and his headline-making week in the wake of a damning investigation by Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz in The New Yorker. “Images have power, I hope. Normally we try to be pretty private, but …

Suspect Arrested For Allegedly Throwing Molotov Cocktail at Sam Altman’s Home

Suspect Arrested For Allegedly Throwing Molotov Cocktail at Sam Altman’s Home

Published by skeptic

San Francisco police arrested an individual early on Friday morning for allegedly attacking the home of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and making threats outside of the company’s headquarters, a spokesperson confirmed to WIRED. OpenAI’s corporate security team sent a note to employees about the incident on Friday. “At approximately 3:45am PT, an unidentified individual approached Sam’s residence and threw an incendiary device toward the property. The device landed nearby and extinguished. There were no injuries and only minimal damage was reported,” the message to staff reads. “Shortly afterward, an individual matching the suspect’s description was contacted by security outside MB1,” the message continues, referring to OpenAI’s headquarters in San Francisco’s Mission Bay neighborhood. “This person made threatening statements about the building.” OpenAI’s corporate security team told staff that it is cooperating with law enforcement to assist with an investigation, and that employees may notice an increased police and security presence around the office on Friday. The security team said that the company’s offices remain open, but employees were advised to “not let anyone tailgate into …

OpenAI’s Sam Altman Has Gone Beyond Hero and Villain

OpenAI’s Sam Altman Has Gone Beyond Hero and Villain

Published by Daniella Wilson

There was a moment, after he staved off a boardroom-coup attempt just before Thanksgiving 2023, when Sam Altman played like a hero, repelling the dark forces of anti-progress. Behold the Great Conqueror, ushering in an era of prosperity when petty doomsday-minded advisors would stand in his way! There was also a moment, after he stepped in to take the Defense Department’s Anthropic deal in early March, when Sam Altman played like a villain, embracing the dark forces of surveillance. Behold the Archangel, swiping souls and privacy data in the name of government contracts! Whatever the full truth of either description (anyone paying attention that November a few years ago soon realized only Wall Street cheered his comeback) I’d argue Altman at this point in his pop-culture evolution has transcended both those designations and any spectral stops in-between. The OpenAI leader has now landed on something else, something that may or may not be problematic but can’t be avoided and indeed whose whole point lies in its unavoidability: pure cinema. I of course mean cinema in a very literal sense. …

OpenAI’s Fidji Simo Is Taking Medical Leave Amid an Executive Shake-Up

OpenAI’s Fidji Simo Is Taking Medical Leave Amid an Executive Shake-Up

Published by skeptic

OpenAI announced a major reorganization on Friday as the company’s CEO of AGI deployment, Fidji Simo, takes medical leave to focus on her health. OpenAI president Greg Brockman will handle the product teams in Simo’s absence. Simo’s previous title was CEO of applications. Brad Lightcap, the chief operating officer and one of Sam Altman’s top deputies, is transitioning to a “special projects” role. Kate Rouch, the chief marketing officer, is taking a leave of absence to focus on her health. Rouch has been undergoing treatment for breast cancer. When she returns, it will be in “a different, more narrowly scoped role,” according to a note Simo shared with OpenAI staff which was viewed by WIRED. “As I shared when I joined, I had a relapse of my neuroimmune condition a few weeks before starting the job,” Simo said in the note which was sent in OpenAI’s “core” Slack channel. “It’s been a bit of a rollercoaster since, and the last month has been particularly rough health-wise. For my entire time here, I’ve postponed medical tests …

OpenAI acquires TBPN, the buzzy founder-led business talk show

OpenAI acquires TBPN, the buzzy founder-led business talk show

Published by skeptic

OpenAI has acquired popular tech industry talk show TBPN — Technology Business Programming Network — making this the AI giant’s first acquisition of a media company. The show will report to OpenAI’s chief political operative, Chris Lehane. TBPN, hosted by former tech founders John Coogan and Jordi Hays, is a daily live show that airs on YouTube and X for three hours, focusing on tech, business, AI, and defense. The show has gained a cult following in Silicon Valley, a safe space where industry power players can speak candidly and be questioned by fellow insiders. The show has a reputation for being something of a Sports Center for the tech industry — a place where top tech CEOs like Mark Zuckerberg, Satya Nadella, Marc Benioff, and, yes, Sam Altman, come to chop it up, react to the news of the day, and occasionally make some of their own. TBPN will continue to live on as its own brand, which OpenAI will help scale. Not that it necessarily needed help on that front; TBPN has grown …

A New AI Documentary Puts CEOs in the Hot Seat—but Goes Too Easy on Them

A New AI Documentary Puts CEOs in the Hot Seat—but Goes Too Easy on Them

Published by skeptic

It’s not easy to get an interview with Sam Altman—just ask Adam Bhala Lough, the filmmaker behind the recent documentary Deepfaking Sam Altman. Lough originally planned a feature exploring the potential and perils of AI that would center on a conversation with the OpenAI CEO. But, after having his inquiries ignored for months, he opted instead to commission a chatbot that mimicked Altman’s speech patterns and approximated his facial expressions by way of a digital avatar. The real Altman did sit down, however, for the new feature The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist, which hits theaters March 27. So did Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, and Demis Hassabis, a cofounder and CEO of Google’s DeepMind Technologies. (Though the filmmakers say they requested interviews with Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and X’s Elon Musk, neither made an appearance.) It’s an impressive level of access for codirector and documentary protagonist Daniel Roher, whose 2022 documentary Navalny, about the Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, won an Academy Award. The problem is that once they’re on camera, …

Disney Pulls Out of B. Deal with OpenAI’s Video Platform Sora

Disney Pulls Out of $1 B. Deal with OpenAI’s Video Platform Sora

Published by José Betancourt

In a surprise move, OpenAI will shut down its Sora AI video app, just months after it was first launched. “We’re saying goodbye to Sora. To everyone who created with Sora, shared it, and built community around it: thank you,” the company said in a statement. “What you made with Sora mattered, and we know this news is disappointing. We’ll share more soon, including timelines for the app and API and details on preserving your work.” A source familiar with the matter tells The Hollywood Reporter that Disney is also exiting the deal it signed with OpenAI last year, in which it pledged to invest $1 billion in the company and agreed to license some of its characters for use in Sora. Related Articles OpenAI, led by CEO Sam Altman, is not getting out of the AI video business (AI video is one of many tools that can take form in the ChatGPT app), of course, but it appears the standalone Sora app will be a casualty of its evolving ambitions. Sora launched last fall, shocking and awing Hollywood with its free use …

OpenAI Enters Its Focus Era by Killing Sora

OpenAI Enters Its Focus Era by Killing Sora

Published by skeptic

OpenAI said Tuesday it would discontinue Sora, its AI video app, roughly six months after launch. The company also said it would shutter the Sora API that allowed developers and Hollywood studios to access the text-to-video model. The move shows how the ChatGPT-maker is trying to focus its efforts ahead of a planned IPO. OpenAI’s chief financial officer Sarah Friar said in an interview with CNBC Tuesday that OpenAI needs to be “ready to be a public company.” Since ChatGPT’s launch, CEO Sam Altman has run the company like Y Combinator, the Silicon Valley incubator he used to lead, placing bets on a wide range of products. This includes Sora, as well as a browser, a family of hardware devices, robots, and Codex, its AI-powered coding agent. These efforts have had varying levels of success, and Sora’s growth in particular has stalled in recent months. After peaking at 3.3 million worldwide downloads across iOS and Android in November 2025, downloads of the Sora app fell to just 1.1 million by February 2026, according to the …

A former Thiel fellow’s startup just launched a drone it says can replace police helicopters

A former Thiel fellow’s startup just launched a drone it says can replace police helicopters

Published by skeptic

When I speak to Blake Resnick, he’s walking around his drone startup’s newest office space in Seattle—a cavernous 50,000-square-foot facility that, Resnick estimates, won’t be fully set up until later in the year—potentially November. Still, the big (and for now, largely empty) building offers the promise of a fast-growing company intent on conquering its particular industry. The industry in question is public safety and the startup is Brinc, which sells drones to police and public agencies across the U.S. The company wants to be the “DJI of the West,” as Resnick has put it—a nod to the Chinese drone manufacturer and a signal that Resnick wants Brinc to become equally synonymous with the tech it sells. A former Thiel Fellow — a prestigious program that funds young entrepreneurs to skip or defer college — Resnick founded Brinc in 2017 and not long afterward garnered interest from then-OpenAI founder Sam Altman, who ultimately served as one of Brinc’s first seed investors. Since then, Brinc has enjoyed a number of funding rounds and, as of its last, …