Sam Altman to blame? Why Microsoft and OpenAI are drifting apart
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I want you to picture Satya Nadella in November 2023. One of the most powerful CEOs in the world, thirteen billion dollars deep into a single bet, finding out his most important business partner just got fired mere moments before the information became public. He called Reid Hoffman, who started calling around looking for something concrete. Embezzlement. Harassment. Anything. They found nothing.
SurveyAlso read: Sam Altman in 2023: AI that lies has “magic”
So Nadella did what any rational person would do when their thirteen billion dollar investment is on fire. He picked a side and the side he picked was Altman’s. That might be the most expensive loyalty call in tech history.
In case you haven’t noticed, all hell has broken for Sam Altman, with severely damaging allegations made by the New Yorker deep dive into not just OpenAI and ChatGPT, but Altman’s own actions as a person and CEO.
To fully measure the scope of Altman’s shady past, the Microsoft thread is the one with the longest tail. Because it goes beyond bitter ex-employee grievances, as the first big tech company that built Altman’s street cred as an AI maverick – the same Microsoft now privately calling him out.
Also read: Sam Altman a ‘sociopath’: Bombshell report claims lack of trust in OpenAI CEO
Microsoft and OpenAI: Measuring the fault lines
To understand how strained things have gotten, it helps to remember what Microsoft was building its AI capabilities on the back of this partnership. In 2024, Microsoft rolled out Copilot across its entire product suite – Word, Excel, Teams, Outlook – betting its enterprise credibility on OpenAI’s models being the best in the business. It was the most visible AI integration any company had attempted at scale, and Microsoft staked its reputation with hundreds of millions of business users on Altman delivering. Copilot became the face of Microsoft’s AI future. OpenAI was the engine underneath it. Now, their own legal terms claim that Copilot is for entertainment purposes only.
Multiple senior Microsoft executives told the investigators that Altman has “misrepresented, distorted, renegotiated, reneged on agreements.” OpenAI reaffirmed Microsoft as exclusive cloud provider for its stateless models, then announced on the very same day a fifty billion dollar deal handing Amazon exclusive reseller rights for its enterprise agent platform. Microsoft believes that arrangement cuts directly against what they were promised. Altman’s camp disagrees because of course it does.
But one Microsoft executive didn’t stop at the contractual dispute. He told the New Yorker that there is a small but real chance Altman can end up finding himself in the same breath as Bernie Madoff and Sam Bankman-Fried. Not as a cautionary tale about hubris or bad judgment but as a scammer.
Think about what it would take for someone inside Microsoft to say that on the record. This is the company that announced it would build a competing AI initiative just to pressure a board into reinstating Altman. Nadella and Altman were co-writing press statements over text during the chaos of the firing. Microsoft didn’t just back Altman in 2023, it saved him and his career. And now its own executives are reaching for the word fraud.
The investigation frames this as one consequence of a broader pattern. A CEO who, according to former colleagues, sets up structures that appear to constrain him, then dismantles them the moment they actually start constraining him.
What Microsoft believed to be a binding commitment may have been nothing more than just a really well-presented sales pitch. Nadella bet thirteen billion dollars that Sam Altman was the right person to build the future. The people who work for him are starting to wonder if he even read the contract.
Also read: Microsoft unhappy with Sam Altman’s dealmaking approach: Report
