A deal like that - if true - would also imply that they should have abruptly fired Sam years ago, before it got signed off
(Of course Satya's comments can also be interpreted as rather more loosely implying they're perfectly capable of maintaining what they've licensed and hiring the expertise to build their own GPT5)
That, plus accounts of him being deceptive/manipulative like this (e.g. https://twitter.com/geoffreyirving/status/172675427761849141...), plus being fired precisely for deception makes it pretty consistent.
If Sam was responsible for that, he smuggled one hell of a trojan horse into OpenAI, and should have been fired a long time ago.
It seems like OpenAI needed deep pockets and access to computing power to survive. That limits the potential companies they could have cut deals with.
The compute resources that are required are massive, and if not MS then you're getting into bed with some other Big Corp, i.e. Amazon, Oracle, IBM, Google, etc.
What's the likelihood that he signed onto a $10 billion investment deal from Microsoft without approval from the board?
Think about it when the deal was on the table:
1) Take the money. If OpenAI fail, MS get the code. OK, who cares, OpenAI have gone bust.
2) Don't take the money, don't become successful unless they can find another partner with such a good fit (deep pockets and resources).
It made sense to allow MS to have the code if OpenAI failed since they'd have had nothing to lose apart from whatever residual value they could sell their IP for (which they already were effectively doing for $10B, so fair enough). If this was a sticking point to secure a $10B investment, it made sense. OTOH if they granted the IP to MS not contingent on OpenAI failing, then that would have been sheer incompetence.
Clearly the possibility of OpenAI failing is not independent from the behaviour of its corporate partner. And I'm not sure Microsoft's negotiation is quite bad faith enough or their interest in OpenAI low enough to have made the entire deal contingent on the "if/when we decide to move aggressively against your company so it collapses we get exclusive free in perpetuity access to everything you ever did and no more caps to the profits from them" clause. If it's in there, it's in there because they signed a bad deal rather than because it was the only possibility.
I think Microsoft could easily spin this as just protecting their interests.
I guess if you believe OpenAI's original stated mission was ever more than a marketing pitch, there's a good argument that it's all been bad anyway (building and licensing extremely impressive tech for their corporate partners and a growing consumer base isn't obviously contributing to making the world a "safer from unfriendly AI" place)
That's based on a long time in business, I can't recall the last time I saw someone blow up an 80 billion dollar company based on ethics alone.