On Friday, the board of OpenAI, the buzzy AI company behind viral chatbot ChatGPT, suddenly and publicly ousted its CEO Sam Altman. The announcement came one day after he appeared publicly on behalf of his company at Thursday’s APEC CEO Summit.
OpenAI’s board said it conducted “a deliberative review process” and that Altman “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 board’s statement continued.
As of this week, OpenAI’s six-person board included OpenAI co-founder and President Greg Brockman, who was also chairman of the board; Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI’s chief scientist; Adam D’Angelo; Tasha McCauley; Helen Toner; and Altman himself. The company began publicly posting its board’s member list on its website in July, after the departures of LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, director of Neuralink Shivon Zilis and former Texas congressman Will Hurd.
Here’s a rundown of the board behind the controversial shake-up:
Greg Brockman: An OpenAI co-founder, Brockman quit his role at the company on Friday in protest of Altman’s ousting, saying publicly, “Sam and I are shocked and saddened by what the board did today.” Brockman spent five years as CTO of Stripe before moving on to help launch OpenAI. In 2020, Brockman said OpenAI’s top obstacle in its first five years was the idea that making the full extent of the startup’s work public wasn’t necessarily beneficial for humanity, in his eyes. At the time, he said, “We realized that as these things get powerful, they’re dual-use…and that we as technology developers have a responsibility to not just say, ‘Hey, we built this thing, it’s up to the world to decide how to use it.'”
Ilya Sutskever: As of now, Sutskever is the sole remaining OpenAI co-founder on the board. After co-founding DNNResearch — an AI startup focused on neural networks — and selling it to Google, Sutskever joined Google as a research scientist and stayed for nearly three years before moving on to OpenAI as a co-founder and research director. Since November 2018, he’s been the company’s chief scientist.
Adam D’Angelo: The current CEO of Quora, a social platform for questions and answers, D’Angelo spent nearly four years at Facebook and was CTO of the tech giant from 2006 to 2008. He is not an employee at OpenAI.
Tasha McCauley: McCauley, who is not an OpenAI employee, is on the board of directors of both OpenAI and GeoSim Systems, a geospatial tech company. She is an adjunct senior management scientist at Rand Corporation and has been on the OpenAI board since 2018.
Helen Toner: Toner is a board member and non-OpenAI employee who spent time at the University of Oxford’s Center for the Governance of AI, and has been a director of strategy for Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology for nearly five years. Last year, Toner told the Journal of Political Risk that, “Building AI systems that are safe, reliable, fair, and interpretable is an enormous open problem… Organizations building and deploying AI will also have to recognize that beating their competitors to market— or to the battlefield — is to no avail if the systems they’re fielding are buggy, hackable, or unpredictable.”
Earlier this year, Microsoft’s expanded investment in OpenAI — an additional $10 billion — made it the biggest AI investment of the year, according to PitchBook. In April, the startup reportedly closed a $300 million share sale at a valuation between $27 billion and $29 billion, with investments from firms such as Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz. Despite its significant investment, however, Microsoft has no board seat at OpenAI.
“While our partnership with Microsoft includes a multibillion-dollar investment, OpenAI remains an entirely independent company governed by the OpenAI Nonprofit,” OpenAI has publicly stated. “Microsoft has no board seat and no control. And… AGI is explicitly carved out of all commercial and IP licensing agreements. These arrangements exemplify why we chose Microsoft as our compute and commercial partner.”
Microsoft had no new comments to add on Saturday and requests for comments from board members weren’t immediately returned to CNBC.
OpenAI’s product feature announcements earlier this month showed that one of the hottest companies in tech has been rapidly evolving its offerings in an effort to stay ahead of rivals like Anthropic, Google and Meta in the AI arms race.
ChatGPT, which broke records as the fastest-growing consumer app in history months after its launch, now has about 100 million weekly active users, OpenAI said this month. More than 92% of Fortune 500 companies use the platform, up from 80% in August, and they span across industries like financial services, legal applications and education, according to Mira Murati, OpenAI’s CTO-turned-interim CEO.
The news of Altman’s ousting comes after OpenAI’s Dev Day, the company’s first in-person event, on Nov. 6, which also included a surprise appearance by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.
“The systems that are needed as you aggressively push forward on your road map require us to be on the top of our game, and we intend fully to commit ourselves fully to making sure you all… have not only the best systems for training and inference, but also the most compute,” Nadella told Altman while onstage together at Dev Day. He added, “That’s the way we’re going to make progress.”
On that day, Altman told Nadella, “I think we have the best partnership in tech and I’m excited for us to build AGI together.”
As recently as last month, OpenAI was reportedly in talks to close a deal that would lead to an $80 billion valuation. When CNBC asked OpenAI COO Brad Lightcap about that deal, he declined to comment.
At OpenAI’s Dev Day, in response to a CNBC question about GPT-5, Altman said, “We want to do it, but we don’t have a timeline.”
CNBC spotted a Tesla robotaxi in Austin, Texas, on June 24, 2025
Katie Tarasov
Elon Musk’s Tesla has applied to test and eventually deploy its Robotaxi vehicles in Phoenix, Arizona, following in the footsteps of market leader Waymo.
Tesla has applied to conduct autonomous vehicle testing and operations, with and without human safety drivers on board, in Arizona, a spokesperson for the Arizona Department of Transportation told CNBC on Thursday. A decision on the application is expected at the end of July, and Tesla has “expressed interest in operating within the Phoenix Metro area,” the spokesperson said via email.
The effort to expand to Arizona comes after Tesla in June began a pilot test of its robotaxis in Austin, Texas. Tesla’s Austin fleet includes Model Y SUVs that are equipped with the company’s newest, automated driving systems. Those vehicles are remotely supervised by employees in an undisclosed operations center, and they each include a human safety supervisor who rides with passengers.
The safety supervisor sits in the front passenger seat, accompanying riders, who are invited fans of Tesla. The supervisor can intervene should the Tesla Robotaxis get into trouble.
Waymo, owned by Google parent Alphabet, opened up a driverless robotaxi service to the public in the Phoenix area in 2020, and now operates a fleet of 400 robotaxis there, the company told CNBC on Thursday.
Tesla, which was once seen as a self-driving pioneer, is now working to catch up to Waymo. The companies have distinct approaches to self-driving technology. Tesla claims its choice to mostly use cameras instead of expensive sensors like lidar will make its autonomous vehicles more economically viable.
The Musk company’s initial efforts in Austin have run into issues.
One invited passenger, who runs a Tesla-focused YouTube channel called Dirty Tesla, captured an incident on camera where his Robotaxi dinged a parked car outside of a restaurant.
Other incidents where Tesla Robotaxis violated rules of the road in Austin have also been captured on camera and circulated on social media, drawing regulatory scrutiny from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the federal vehicle safety agency.
Tesla is scheduled to hold a second-quarter earnings call on July 23, during which executives are expected to discuss the initial Robotaxi pilot.
Separately, Musk on Wednesday said on X that Tesla’s Robotaxi service will expand to the San Francisco Bay Area “probably in a month or two.”
California Public Utilities Commission and the California Department of Motor Vehicles told CNBC on Thursday that Tesla has not yet applied for approvals to begin driverless testing or commercial deployment of its Robotaxis in the state.
The California DMV sued Tesla in 2022 alleging that the company made false claims in marketing and advertising about its vehicles’ self-driving capabilities.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang delivers remarks next to U.S. President Donald Trump at an ‘Investing in America’ event in Washington, D.C., on April 30, 2025.
Leah Millis | Reuters
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang will meet with President Donald Trump at the White House on Thursday, CNBC’s Megan Cassella reported.
The meeting comes as Nvidia rose slightly on Thursday, becoming the first company to close a trading day with a market cap over $4 trillion, beating Apple and Microsoft to the symbolic milestone. Nvidia touched the mark briefly on Wednesday during trading.
Trump praised Nvidia stock in a social media post Thursday morning.
“NVIDIA IS UP 47% SINCE TRUMP TARIFFS. USA is taking in Hundreds of Billions of Dollars in Tariffs,” Trump posted on Truth Social. “COUNTRY IS NOW ‘BACK.'”
An Nvidia representative declined to comment, and it was unclear what the meeting is about, but Nvidia has been grappling with export controls on its artificial intelligence chips implemented by the Trump administration in April for national security reasons.
At the time, the U.S. government told Nvidia that its previously-approved H20 processor — intended exclusively for the Chinese market — would require an export license. Huang previously told investors that requirement effectively cut off Nvidia’s sales to China with “no grace period.” The AI chipmaker said that it would miss $8 billion in planned orders for the chip in the company’s July quarter.
“The $50 billion China market is effectively closed to U.S. industry,” Huang told investors on an earnings call in May.
Nvidia also faces another potential restriction on AI chip exports after the Trump administration cancelled a planned rule by former President Joe Biden called the “AI diffusion rule.” The Trump administration promised newer, simpler restrictions later this year on which countries could receive Nvidia’s technology.
Ex-CNN anchor Don Lemon‘s lawsuit against tech billionaire Elon Musk and his social network X over the cancellation of their partnership can proceed to trial, a San Francisco judge ruled this week.
Musk’s team had tried to get the case moved to a Texas court and tried to convince the judge to strike the complaint altogether.
Attorneys for Musk and X didn’t respond to a request for comment.
In an order Tuesday, Judge Harold Kahn said Lemon and his attorneys plausibly alleged, among other claims, that X and Musk had committed “fraud by false promise” and that there was “an implied contract” between them.
Lemon filed the suit in August 2024 after X canceled a partnership with the broadcast journalist a few hours after he taped a tense interview with Musk, who owns X. The interview preceded a planned premiere of Lemon’s new show on Musk’s social network.
During the interview, Lemon pressed Musk on several contentious topics he had posted about or amplified on X. Musk had boosted the so-called “great replacement theory,” and other bigoted tropes and falsehoods, including posts that claimed there was a “Hispanic invasion” of immigrants to the U.S.
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Lemon also pressed Musk about content moderation on X, and a reported surge in antisemitic content on the platform that occurred after Musk acquired it as Twitter in a $44 billion leveraged buyout in late 2022.
Musk made sweeping changes after taking over the site, firing huge numbers of personnel and reversing account bans for users who had been booted from the platform after posting hate speech or inciting violence.
Musk, who characterized himself as a free speech “absolutist” also restored the account of President Donald Trump. The site had permanently banned Trump from the platform in January 2021 following the attack by his supporters on the U.S. Capitol.
Lemon’s case against Musk and X Corp. is in San Francisco Superior Court. A date has not been set for the trial.
Musk and X have faced a litany of other lawsuits over non-payment to vendors and over failure to provide severance as promised to laid-off employees from Twitter.
Lemon was fired from CNN in 2023 following reports that he mistreated coworkers and made sexist remarks on-air, including about politician Nikki Haley. Lemon later apologized for the Haley comments.