Will Sam Altman always win the OpenAI board fight in an AI agent simulation?

Posted byby Dean Takahashi
November 21, 2024
Updated June 17, 2025
9 min

A year ago today, Sam Altman returned to OpenAI after being fired just five days earlier. What really happened in the boardroom? Fable, a game and AI simulation company, built its AI Sim Francisco “war game” to find out why the behind closed doors board fight turned out the way it did.

It feels a bit weird to simulate a real-life event in this way, but Fable CEO Edward Saatchi is interested in whether a different set of decisions could have led to a different outcome for this company at the center of the generative AI revolution.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.