OpenAI’s credibility — and the credibility of its CEO, Sam Altman — is crumbling. Last week, amid a surprise string of high-profile executive and safety team departures, Vox revealed that the ChatGPT creator had pressured employees into signing draconian non-disclosure and non-disparagement agreements by threatening to claw back exiting OpenAI employees’ vested equity in the multibillion-dollar AI company. Clawing back vested equity — in short, the amount of company ownership that an employee has gained through their months or years of working there — is a highly unusual practice to begin with. This is especially true in the startup-powered Silicon Valley, where tech workers often forgo high salaries in favor of equity agreements based on the hope that they’ll get rich later when a successful startup like OpenAI eventually goes public. For OpenAI to play bizarre contractual take-backsies in exchange for narrative control over former employees would be an awful look for any company — let alone a supposedly “open” venture claiming it’s the best one to build the imagined all-knowing AI that OpenAI’s leaders say will power humanity’s future. In response to the Vox report, Altman apologetically took to X-formerly-Twitter to admit that yes, “there was a provision about potential equity cancellation in our previous exit docs.” But according to the CEO, though the clause was there, the company never actually clawed anything back. Most importantly, he further claimed that he had no knowledge of the provision. “This is on me and one of the few times I’ve been genuinely…Leaked OpenAI Documents Show Sam Altman Was Clearly Aware of Silencing Former Employees