Ilya Sutskever makes bombshell revelation on OpenAI-Anthropic merger, claims Sam Altman had ‘pattern of lying’

Former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever has made some explosive revelations during the onging legal battle between OpenAI and Elon Musk. Sutskever also shed light on the reasons for the infamous firing of Sam Altman from the company, noting that he had spent nearly a year collecting evidence for the OpenAI board that showed Altman had a “consistent pattern of lying.”

Testifying in a California courtroom on Monday, Sutskever confirmed that he had been considering removing Altman as CEO well before the dramatic November 2023 boardroom shake-up and discussed with OpenAI CTO Mira Murati ‘for a long time’ on removing the executive.

According to Reuters, Sutskever testified that Altman’s conduct included “undermining and pitting executives against one another”.

“Altman’s conduct was not conducive to any grand goal,” Sutskever said during testimony, referring to OpenAI’s mission of building safe artificial general intelligence (AGI).

After the backlash from employees over Altman's firing, Sutskever later reversed course and even expressed regret over his “participation in the board’s actions” while voting to reinstate Altman as CEO.

In a setback for Musk, however, Sutskever also confirmed that he never made a promise to Elon Musk that OpenAI would remain a non-profit. The former OpenAI chief scientist said he “made no such promise,” while adding “The mission of OpenAI is larger than its nonprofit or for-profit structure.”

Sutskever also noted that he had opposed Musk's proposal to merge OpenAI with Tesla.

According to Reuters, the remaining OpenAI board had discussed a proposal under which Anthropic, the company behind Claude AI, could merge with OpenAI and potentially take over leadership of the company. Notably, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei had earlier served as the Vice President of Research at OpenAI before leaving the company in 2021 to start his own rival startup.

Sutskever, however, said he was “not excited” about the idea of merging OpenAI with another company.

After the outster of Altman, Sutskever eventually signed a petitioned by OpenAI employees to bring back Altman which he described as a “Hail Mary” in order to protect the company from being ‘destroyed’, Forbes reported.

The AI researcher also confirmed that his stake in OpenAI was around $5 billion in November last year and is now valued at around $7 billion. Earlier, OpenAI president Greg Brockman had also recently confirmed that his equity in the compay was valuedl at roughly $30 billion.

The ChatGPT maker had recently closed a $122 billion funding round that had valued the startup at $852 billion.

Notably, Musk had helped co-found OpenAI along with Altman, Brockman and Sutskever in 2015. The billinoaire invested around $38 billion in the company and has accused the company of moving away from its initial mission of building AI for the benefit of humanity in favour of a profit driven motive.

Musk is seeking up to $150 billion in damages along with the removal of Altman and Brockman from leadership roles in the high profile trial.