OpenAI was planning to add more members to the board. Meanwhile Sam and GDB are fully productizing the company, even training GPT5. The safety group has been increasingly concerned and feels the non-profit charter has been slowly losing over it its $ minded startup side. They see the writing on the wall, as most employees care about those sweet $ ppu’s, and decide they have a last ditch effort, maybe 25% chance, of averting this successfully. They feel they have to do it otherwise the company will just be Microsoft accelerating GPT development into our oblivion. They aren’t quite successful.

Remember, this company was founded, 8 years ago, with Sama writing “Why You Should Fear Machine Intelligence.”

Although vaguely possible, there’s something else to the story as Emmett Shear said “The board did not remove Sam over any specific disagreement on safety, their reasoning was completely different from that.”

https://blog.samaltman.com/machine-intelligence-part-1

Only explanation acceptable for me now is Hanlon's razor mixed with a Despair Inc poster.

"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

And

"Meetings : None of us is as dumb as all of us."

Two camps: one camp was into moving fast, cranking out products and profit. The other group watching from the side, claiming to be worried about the future of humanity. The group watching though had the power to fire the leaders of the other group, and they did.

It didn’t have to be any deeper philosophical disagreements or anything, just plain old rivalry and power grab. Of course it wouldn’t be written down as it’s just childish, but that’s how people behave, especially when newly found fame and power gets to their heads.

The most plausible sounding reason I’ve heard is that Open AI was originally a charity. People donated money to a cause. Most who donated got nothing in return. Those who donated a lot got board seats.

Now, the the employees of the for-profit arm of the organization are all trying to get rich while those who donated the original money get nothing. But… they still have their board seats, and they’re weaponizing them.