Ilya Sutskever's deposition reveals details of the 2023 OpenAI board conflict

A transcript of Ilya Sutskever’s deposition in Musk v. OpenAI — Elon Musk’s suit over OpenAI’s shift toward a for-profit structure — became public, adding detail to the internal conflict that led OpenAI’s board to fire and then reinstate Sam Altman in November 2023. Sutskever, then chief scientist and a board member, was questioned for close to ten hours on 1 October 2025.

The transcript centred on a memo, roughly 52 pages long, that Sutskever had compiled and circulated to the board’s three independent directors using an auto-deleting email service to reduce the risk of a leak. Its opening line alleged that Altman “exhibits a consistent pattern of lying, undermining his execs, and pitting his execs against one another.” Under questioning, Sutskever acknowledged that most of the specific allegations, including supporting screenshots, had been passed to him by then-CTO Mira Murati rather than observed directly, and that he had not independently verified them with the people involved — in one instance, a claim that Altman had been “pushed out” of Y Combinator for similar conduct, sourced to a conversation Murati said she’d had with another executive, which Sutskever never confirmed himself. He testified that the board’s process leading to the firing had been “rushed,” attributing this partly to the independent directors’ inexperience, and said he had considered pushing to remove Altman roughly a year before the board acted.

The deposition did not change the established outward facts of the firing and Altman’s reinstatement five days later, already the record’s own account of the episode. What it added was Sutskever’s own characterisation of how thin the evidentiary basis for the board’s action had been — a detail that had not previously been public, and one both sides in the Musk litigation had reason to make part of the record.