If you lie to board members about other board members in an attempt to gain control over the board, I assert that the board should fire you, pretty much no matter what
No! Wrong! Not no matter what! In a normal company with good governance, absolutely. Lying to the board is the main bad thing that the CEO can do, from a certain perspective. But there are definitely some companies — Elon Musk runs like eight of them, but also OpenAI — where, if you lie to board members about other board members in an attempt to gain control over the board, the board members you lie about should probably say “I’m sure that deep down this is our fault, we’re sorry we made you lie about us, we’ll see ourselves out.”
To be clear, I am very sympathetic to the OpenAI board’s confusion. This was not a simple dumb mistake. They did not think “we are the normal board of a normal public company, and we have to supervise our CEO to make sure that he pursues shareholder value effectively.” This was a much weirder and more reasonable mistake. They thought “we are the board of a nonprofit set up to pursue the difficult and risky mission of achieving artificial general intelligence for the benefit of humanity, and we have to supervise our CEO to make sure he does that.” Lying to the board seems quite bad as a matter of, you know, AI misalignment.
Matt Levine, in response to:
writes: