While there have been rumours that some staff members approached the board over their concerns that he was pushing through a new “superAI” which would lead to the end of the world as we know it, another concern has also reared its head.

The Washington Post has reported how a small number of senior leaders approached the board of OpenAI with concerns about chief executive Sam Altman claiming he hand been “psychologically abusive.”

Apparently, Altman had been creating pockets of chaos and delays at the artificial intelligence start-up, according to two people familiar with the board's thinking. The company leaders, a group that included key figures and people who manage large teams, mentioned Altman's allegedly pitting employees against each other in unhealthy ways, the people said.

Although the board members didn't use the language of abuse to describe Altman's behaviour, these complaints echoed some of their interactions with Altman over the years, and they had already been debating the board's ability to hold the CEO accountable. Several board members thought Altman had lied to them, for example, as part of a campaign to remove board member Helen Toner after she published a paper criticising OpenAI, the people said.

The new complaints triggered a review of Altman's conduct, during which the board weighed the devotion Altman had cultivated among factions of the company against the risk that OpenAI could lose key leaders who found interacting with him highly toxic.

They also considered reports from several employees who said they feared retaliation from Altman: One told the board that Altman was hostile after the employee shared critical feedback with the CEO and that he undermined the employee on that person's team, the people said.

The complaints about Altman's alleged behaviour, which have not previously been reported, were a major factor in the board's abrupt decision to fire Altman on 17 November, according to the people. Initially cast as a clash over the safe development of artificial intelligence, Altman's firing was at least partially motivated by the sense that his behaviour would make it impossible for the board to oversee the CEO.

The board had heard from some senior executives at OpenAI who had issues with Altman, said one person familiar with directors' thinking. But the person said that employees approached board members warily because they feared the potential repercussions of Altman finding out they had spoken out against him.

While over 95% of the company's employees signed an open letter after Altman's firing demanding his return, "On social media, in news reports and on the anonymous app Blind, which requires members to sign up with a work email address to post, people identified as current OpenAI employees also described facing intense peer pressure to sign the mass-resignation letter."

The Post also spotted a cryptic and now deleted post on X Wednesday from OpenAI co-founder and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever about lessons learned over the past month: "One such lesson is that the phrase 'the beatings will continue until morale improves' applies more often than it has any right to.'"