Who Did OpenAI's Board Consider After Firing Sam Altman?

Kevin Roose says that during the five days after Sam Altman was fired, OpenAI's board looked for a new chief executive and passed on two options. Alexander Wang, whom Roose describes as Altman's former roommate, told the board he was interested in the job, according to Roose's sources. Alex Kantrowitz notes that Wang now runs Meta's Superintelligence Lab.

The board also held a middle-of-the-night call with Dario Amodei and Daniela Amodei, the chief executive and president of Anthropic. They had left OpenAI about three years earlier, in Roose's account, because they could not trust Altman. Each side was sounding the other out. One idea on the table was merging OpenAI and Anthropic under Dario and Daniela Amodei.

Roose says that merger did not come close, according to the people he talked to, but it was one of many ideas the board considered. Wang running OpenAI would have been another fork in the road. The board passed on both.