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Sam Altman, Chief Executive Officer of OpenAI, and Mira Murati, Chief Technology Officer of OpenAI, speak during The Wall Street Journal’s WSJ Tech Live Conference in Laguna Beach, California on October 17, 2023. 

Patrick T. Fallon | Afp | Getty Images

OpenAI’s board of directors said Friday that Sam Altman will step down as CEO and will be replaced by technology chief Mira Murati.

The company said it conducted “a deliberative review process” and “concluded that he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities.”

“The board no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI,” the statement said.

OpenAI’s board includes chief scientist Ilya Sutskever and independent directors like Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo, technology entrepreneur Tasha McCauley, and Helen Toner of the Georgetown Center for Security and Emerging Technology. OpenAI says the board of its 501(c)(3) is the “overall governing body for all OpenAI activities.”

The board also said that Greg Brockman, OpenAI’s president, “will be stepping down as chairman of the board and will remain in his role at the company, reporting to the CEO.”

OpenAI, which has raised billions of dollars from Microsoft and ranked first on CNBC’s Disruptor 50 list this year, jumped into the mainstream late last year after releasing its AI chatbot ChatGPT to the public. The service went viral by allowing users to convert simple text into creative conversation and has pushed big tech companies like Alphabet and Meta to step up their investments in generative AI.

Microsoft shares slipped after the announcement, closing the day down 1.7% at $369.84.

OpenAI launched as a non-profit model in 2015 with backing from Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who reportedly committed $1 billion to the project. Before taking over as CEO, Altman was president of startup accelerator Y Combinator and gained prominence in Silicon Valley as an early-stage investor. Earlier in his career, he started social networking company Loopt.

Altman didn’t immediately respond to a request for more information.

— CNBC’s Lora Kolodny contributed to this report

WATCH: OpenAI says Altman exiting as CEO

OpenAI says Sam Altman exits as CEO after board loses confidence

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Ambarella shares soar 19% on report chip designer is exploring sale

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Ambarella shares soar 19% on report chip designer is exploring sale

Thomas Fuller | SOPA Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images

Ambarella shares popped 19% after a report that the chip designer is currently working with bankers on a potential sale.

Bloomberg reported the news, citing sources familiar with the matter.

While no deal is imminent, the sources told Bloomberg that the firm may draw interest from semiconductor companies looking to improve their automotive business. Private equity firms have already expressed interest, according to the report.

Read more CNBC tech news

The Santa Clara, California-based company is known for its system-on-chip semiconductors and software used for edge artificial intelligence. Ambarella chips are used in the automotive sector for electronic mirrors and self-driving assistance systems.

Shares have slumped about 18% year to date. The company’s market capitalization last stood at nearly $2.6 billion.

Read the Bloomberg story here.

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Nvidia CEO Huang sells $15 million worth of stock, first sale of $873 million plan

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Nvidia CEO Huang sells  million worth of stock, first sale of 3 million plan

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang attends a roundtable discussion at the Viva Technology conference dedicated to innovation and startups at Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris on June 11, 2025.

Sarah Meyssonnier | Reuters

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang sold 100,000 shares of the chipmaker’s stock on Friday and Monday, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

The sales are worth nearly $15 million at Tuesday’s opening price.

The transactions are the first sale in Huang’s plan to sell as many as 600,000 shares of Nvidia through the end of 2025. It’s a plan that was announced in March, and it’d be worth $873 million at Tuesday’s opening price.

The Nvidia founder still owns more than 800 million Nvidia shares, according to Monday’s SEC filing. Huang has a net worth of about $126 billion, ranking him 12th on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

The 62-year-old chief executive sold about $700 million in Nvidia shares last year under a prearranged plan, too.

Nvidia stock is up more than 800% since December 2022 after OpenAI’s ChatGPT was first released to the public. That launch drew attention to Nvidia’s graphics processing units, or GPUs, which were needed to develop and power the artificial intelligence service.

The company’s chips remain in high demand with the majority of the AI chip market, and Nvidia has introduced two subsequent generations of its AI GPU technology.

Nvidia continues to grow. Its stock is up 9% this year, even as the company faces export control issues that could limit foreign markets for its AI chips.

In May, the company reported first-quarter earnings that showed the chipmaker’s revenue growing 69% on an annual basis to $44 billion during the quarter.

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Judge rules Anthropic did not violate authors’ copyrights with AI book training

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Judge rules Anthropic did not violate authors' copyrights with AI book training

Dario Amodei, Anthropic CEO, speaking on CNBC’s Squawk Box outside the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on Jan. 21st, 2025.

Gerry Miller | CNBC

Anthropic‘s use of books to train its artificial intelligence model Claude was “fair use” and “transformative,” a federal judge ruled late on Monday.

Amazon-backed Anthropic’s AI training did not violate the authors’ copyrights since the large language models “have not reproduced to the public a given work’s creative elements, nor even one author’s identifiable expressive style,” wrote U.S. District Judge William Alsup.

“The purpose and character of using copyrighted works to train LLMs to generate new text was quintessentially transformative,” Alsup wrote. “Like any reader aspiring to be a writer.”

The decision was a significant win for AI companies as legal battles play out over the use and application of copyrighted works in developing and training LLMs. Alsup’s ruling begins to establish the legal limits and opportunities for the industry going forward.

Read more CNBC reporting on AI

A spokesperson for Anthropic said in a statement that the company was “pleased” with the ruling and that the decision was, “Consistent with copyright’s purpose in enabling creativity and fostering scientific progress.”

CNBC has reached out to the plaintiffs for comment.

The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, was brought by authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson in August. The suit alleged that Anthropic built a “multibillion-dollar business by stealing hundreds of thousands of copyrighted books.”

Alsup did, however, order a trial on the pirated material that Anthropic put into its central library of content, even though the company did not use it for AI training.

“That Anthropic later bought a copy of a book it earlier stole off the internet will not absolve it of liability for the theft, but it may affect the extent of statutory damages,” the judge wrote.

WATCH: Anthropic unveils next AI models

Anthropic unveils next AI models

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