A Manhattan judge on Wednesday declined to impose sanctions on Michael D. Cohen, the former fixer for former President Donald J. Trump, after he accidentally gave his lawyer false legal citations concocted by Google Bard, an artificial intelligence program, for a motion filed by the attorney. was preparing on behalf of Mr. Cohen.

The lawyer, David M. Schwartz, cited the bogus cases in his petition, which was filed in Federal District Court.

The judge, Jesse M. Furman, said the episode was embarrassing and unfortunate, but he had accepted Mr. Cohen’s explanation that he did not understand how Google Bard worked and that he had not intended to deceive Mr. Schwartz. The judge also said he had not found that Mr. Schwartz had acted in bad faith.

“Indeed, it would have been downright irrational for him to have presented Schwartz with false cases to include in the motion, knowing them to be bogus,” Judge Furman wrote of Mr. Cohen, a former lawyer who has been disbarred, given the likelihood that Mr Cohen will be excluded. Schwartz, the government or the court would discover the problem, “with potentially serious adverse consequences for Cohen himself.”

The issue was raised in a case involving tax evasion and campaign finance violations committed by Mr. Cohen on behalf of Mr. Trump. Mr. Cohen pleaded guilty in 2018 and served time in prison. He had asked for an early end to the court’s supervision of his case, after he was released from prison and fulfilled the conditions of his release.

Judge Furman had denied three previous such requests from Mr. Cohen. In his latest filing, his lawyer, Mr. Schwartz, pointed out that his client testified for two days last fall in the civil fraud trial of Mr. Trump in New York state. Mr. Cohen’s “willingness to come forward and make truthful statements,” Mr. Schwartz argued, “demonstrates an exceptional level of remorse and a commitment to upholding the law.”

But Judge Furman said that Mr. Cohen’s testimony in the state trial “in fact provides grounds for denying his request, not granting it.” The judge cited Mr. Cohen’s testimony in the civil trial in which he admitted that he lied in federal court when he pleaded guilty to tax evasion, which he now says he did not commit.

A lawyer for Mr. Cohen did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Judge Furman’s ruling.

Mr. Cohen’s credibility will be at the heart of Mr. Trump’s first criminal trial, set to begin in Manhattan in mid-April. Mr. Cohen, one of the prosecution’s star witnesses, was involved in the hush-money deal at the center of the case, brought by the Manhattan district attorney’s office. Mr. Trump’s lawyers could try to use Mr. Cohen’s inconsistent statements during the civil fraud trial, and possibly even Judge Furman’s ruling, to portray him as a liar. But the district attorney’s office will likely counter that Mr. Cohen has told many of his previous lies on Mr. Trump’s behalf, and that he has been telling a consistent story about the hush-money deal for years.

The judge overseeing the civil fraud trial, Arthur F. Engoron, had said he found Mr. Cohen’s testimony “credible” and imposed a crushing $454 million judgment on Mr. Trump.

It was in his request to end judicial supervision of his case that Mr. Cohen sought to assist his lawyer, Mr. Schwarz.

Mr. Cohen said in an affidavit in December that he had not kept pace with “emerging trends (and associated risks) in legal technology and did not realize that Google Bard was a generative text service that, like ChatGPT, citations and could show descriptions. that looked real, but in reality were not.”

Mr. Cohen also said he had not realized that Mr. Schwartz “would drop the cases in their entirety without even confirming that they existed.”

Mr. Cohen asked Judge Furman to exercise “discretion and mercy.”

The case is one of several to surface in Manhattan federal court in the past year in which the use of artificial intelligence has tainted the trials. Nationally, there have been at least 15 cases in which lawyers or litigants representing themselves were alleged to have used chatbots for legal research that ended up in lawsuits, according to Eugene Volokh, a law professor at UCLA who has written about artificial intelligence and the law.

The issue entered the public consciousness last year after Judge P. Kevin Castel, also of Manhattan federal court, fined two lawyers $5,000 after admitting they submitted a brief filled with non-existent decisions and legal citations generated by ChatGPT.

A series of similar cases in federal courts in Manhattan followed.

In one case, an attorney acknowledged that she had cited a “non-existent case” – Matter of Bourguignon v. Coulated Behavioral Health Services, Inc. – which she said was “suggested by ChatGPT” after her own research failed to reach a decision supporting an argument she was making. In January, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit referred her to a court panel that investigates complaints against attorneys.

And in another case, Federal District Court Judge Paul A. Engelmayer rebuked a law firm in Auburn, NY, which openly admitted that it had used ChatGPT to substantiate a request for attorney fees in a lawsuit against the New York State Department of Education. York City.

Judge Engelmayer said ChatGPT’s “invocation of support for its aggressive bid is completely and unusually unpersuasive.”

The cases highlight the challenges facing the legal profession as lawyers increasingly rely on chatbots to draft legal briefs. The artificial intelligence programs, such as ChatGPT and Bard (now known as Gemini), generate realistic responses by guessing which text fragments should follow other sequences.

Mr. Cohen wrote in his statement that he understood Bard to be “a supercharged search engine” that he had used in the past to obtain accurate information. The cases he found and passed on to Mr Schwartz appear to have been “hallucinations” – a term used to refer to chatbot-generated inaccuracies.

The episode became public in December when Judge Furman said in an order that he could not find any of the three decisions Mr. Schwartz cited in his motion. He ordered Mr. Schwartz to provide him with copies of the decisions or “a thorough explanation of how the motion was made to cite cases that do not exist and what role Mr. Cohen played.”

Mr. Schwartz said in his own statement that he had not independently reviewed the cases Mr. Cohen had presented because Mr. Cohen indicated that another attorney had given him suggestions for the motion.

“I sincerely apologize to the court for not personally reviewing these matters before submitting them to the court,” Mr. Schwartz wrote.

Barry Kamins, a lawyer for Mr. Schwartz, said Wednesday: “We are pleased that the court has deemed this error as one not made in bad faith by Mr. Schwartz.”

Ben Protess reporting contributed.

Saudi Arabia’s government plans to set up a roughly $40 billion fund to invest in artificial intelligence, according to three people briefed on the plans — the latest sign of the gold rush for a technology that has already begun reshaping the way people live and work.

In recent weeks, representatives of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund have discussed a possible partnership with Andreessen Horowitz, one of Silicon Valley’s top venture capital firms, and other backers, said the people, who were not authorized to speak publicly. They warned that plans could still change.

The planned technology fund would make Saudi Arabia the world’s largest investor in artificial intelligence. It would also spotlight the oil-rich country’s global business ambitions, as well as its efforts to diversify its economy and establish itself as a more influential player in geopolitics. The Middle East is pursuing these goals through its sovereign wealth fund, which has assets of more than $900 billion.

Saudi fund officials discussed the role that Andreessen Horowitz — already an active investor in AI and whose co-founder Ben Horowitz is friends with the fund’s governor — could play and how such a fund would work, the people said . The $40 billion target would dwarf the typical amounts raised by U.S. venture capital firms and would be eclipsed only by SoftBank, the Japanese conglomerate that has long been the world’s largest investor in startups.

The Saudi technology fund, which is being set up with the help of Wall Street banks, will be the latest potential entrant into an area already awash with cash. The global artificial intelligence frenzy has pushed up the valuations of private and public companies as bullish investors rush to find or build the next Nvidia or OpenAI. For example, startup Anthropic raised more than $7 billion in one year alone—a flood of money that is virtually unheard of in the venture capital world.

The costs of financing AI projects are high. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman reportedly did just that was looking for a large amount of money from the United Arab Emirates government to boost production of chips needed to power AI technology.

Saudi representatives have told potential partners that the country is looking to back a range of technology startups related to artificial intelligence, including chip makers and the expensive, sprawling data centers that are increasingly necessary to power the next generation of computers. according to four people with knowledge of these efforts, who were not authorized to speak publicly. It has even considered starting its own AI companies.

Two of the people said Saudi Arabia’s new investment push is likely to take off in the second half of 2024. A $40 billion fund could make both the Saudi Arabian government and Andreessen Horowitz key players in the race to corner several companies related to the field.

Mr. Horowitz and Yasir al-Rumayyan, the governor of the Public Investment Fund, have discussed the possibility of the Silicon Valley company setting up an office in the country’s capital, Riyadh, a person with knowledge of the talks said.

Other venture capitalists could join the kingdom’s technology fund, two people briefed on the plans said.

Partly because of its enormous financial strength and growing ambitions, people in international business circles are closely watching the moves of the Public Investment Fund, which was founded in 1971.

In 2018, just as Saudi Arabia was becoming a major destination for investment firms and entrepreneurs seeking financial support, the country’s agents murdered dissident Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the kingdom’s consulate in Istanbul, triggering a for a while seemed to damage the country’s reputation among international financiers. .

In 2022, the Saudi government invested billions in a company led, among others, by former President Donald J. Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, which was seen by many as a political move. One of the recent deals to merge the LIV Golf upstart with the PGA Tour drew the ire of golfers, but the pact is also controversial in part because of Saudi Arabia’s human rights record.

Saudi Arabia, which invested $3.5 billion in Uber in 2016, has largely struggled with technology investments. It handed SoftBank $45 billion for the Japanese company’s $100 billion Vision fund, which was funneled to dozens of ventures including now-bankrupt real estate company WeWork and other failed startups such as robot pizza company Zume.

Many in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street have welcomed the nation back into their fold. At this year’s Super Bowl, Mr. Horowitz hosted Mr. al-Rumayyan, according to two people briefed on their activities.

The two men also spent time together before and after the match, the people said, with Mr. Horowitz giving Mr. al-Rumayyan tours of Las Vegas, his adopted city, and introducing the investor to his friends in music and sports.

Michael D. Cohen, the former fixer for former President Donald J. Trump, said in newly released court documents that he falsely gave his lawyer false legal citations after the artificial intelligence program Google Bard made them up for him.

The fictitious quotes were then used in a motion filed with a federal judge in Manhattan. Mr. Cohen, who pleaded guilty to campaign finance violations in 2018 and served time in prison, had asked for an early end to judicial oversight of his case now that he was out of jail and had complied with terms of his release.

In an affidavit made public Friday, Mr. Cohen explained that he had not kept pace with “emerging trends (and associated risks) in legal technology and did not realize that Google Bard was a generative text service that, just like ChatGPT, quotes and descriptions that looked real, but actually weren’t.”

He also said he did not realize that the attorney who filed the motion on his behalf, David M. Schwartz, “would drop the cases in their entirety without even acknowledging that they existed.”

The revelation could have serious consequences for the Manhattan criminal case against Mr. Trump, in which Mr. Cohen is expected to appear as a key witness. The former president’s lawyers have long attacked Mr. Cohen as a serial fabulist; now they will have a brand new example.

A spokeswoman for the Manhattan district attorney’s office declined to comment.

The new information about Mr. Cohen’s role in creating the bogus cases comes after the judge, Jesse M. Furman of the Federal District Court, said in an order on December 12 that he did not approve of any of the three decisions cited by Mr. Schwartz could find. and ordered him to provide copies to the court.

If Mr. Schwartz could not present the cases, Judge Furman said, the lawyer would have to file an affidavit containing “a thorough explanation of how the motion came to raise matters that do not exist and what role, if any, Mr. Cohen has played.” played in drafting or reviewing the motion before it was filed.”

Mr. Schwartz should also explain why he should not be sanctioned “for presenting non-existent matters to the court,” Judge Furman said in the Dec. 12 order.

The episode is the second this year in which lawyers in Manhattan federal court have cited bogus court decisions created through the use of an artificial intelligence program.

Jonah E. Bromwich reporting contributed.

Around noon on Nov. 17, Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, logged into a video call from a luxury hotel in Las Vegas. He was in the city for its inaugural Formula 1 race, which had drawn 315,000 visitors including Rihanna and Kylie Minogue.

Mr. Altman, who had parlayed the success of OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot into personal stardom beyond the tech world, had a meeting lined up that day with Ilya Sutskever, the chief scientist of the artificial intelligence start-up. But when the call started, Mr. Altman saw that Dr. Sutskever was not alone — he was virtually flanked by OpenAI’s three independent board members.

Instantly, Mr. Altman knew something was wrong.

Unbeknownst to Mr. Altman, Dr. Sutskever and the three board members had been whispering behind his back for months. They believed Mr. Altman had been dishonest and should no longer lead a company that was driving the A.I. race. On a hush-hush 15-minute video call the previous afternoon, the board members had voted one by one to push Mr. Altman out of OpenAI.

Now they were delivering the news. Shocked that he was being fired from a start-up he had helped found, Mr. Altman widened his eyes and then asked, “How can I help?” The board members urged him to support an interim chief executive. He assured them that he would.

Within hours, Mr. Altman changed his mind and declared war on OpenAI’s board.

His ouster was the culmination of years of simmering tensions at OpenAI that pit those alarmed by A.I.’s power against others who saw the technology as a once-in-a-lifetime profit and prestige bonanza. As divisions deepened, the organization’s leaders sniped and turned on one another. That led to a boardroom brawl that ultimately showed who has the upper hand in A.I.’s future development: Silicon Valley’s tech elite and deep-pocketed corporate interests.

The drama embroiled Microsoft, which had committed $13 billion to OpenAI and weighed in to protect its investment. Many top Silicon Valley executives and investors, including the chief executive of Airbnb, also mobilized to support Mr. Altman.

Some fought back from Mr. Altman’s $27 million mansion in San Francisco’s Russian Hill neighborhood, lobbying through social media and voicing their displeasure in private text threads, according to interviews with more than 25 people with knowledge of the events. Many of their conversations and the details of their confrontations have not been previously reported.

At the center of the storm was Mr. Altman, a 38-year-old multimillionaire. A vegetarian who raises cattle and a tech leader with little engineering training, he is driven by a hunger for power more than by money, a longtime mentor said. And even as Mr. Altman became A.I.’s public face, charming heads of state with predictions of the technology’s positive effects, he privately angered those who believed he ignored its potential dangers.

OpenAI’s chaos has raised new questions about the people and companies behind the A.I. revolution. If the world’s premier A.I. start-up can so easily plunge into crisis over backbiting behavior and slippery ideas of wrongdoing, can it be trusted to advance a technology that may have untold effects on billions of people?

“OpenAI’s aura of invulnerability has been shaken,” said Andrew Ng, a Stanford professor who helped found the A.I. labs at Google and the Chinese tech giant Baidu.

An Incendiary Mix

From the moment it was created in 2015, OpenAI was primed to combust.

The San Francisco lab was founded by Elon Musk, Mr. Altman, Dr. Sutskever and nine others. Its goal was to build A.I. systems to benefit all of humanity. Unlike most tech start-ups, it was established as a nonprofit with a board that was responsible for making sure it fulfilled that mission.

The board was stacked with people who had competing A.I. philosophies. On one side were those who worried about A.I.’s dangers, like Mr. Musk, who left OpenAI in a huff in 2018. On the other were Mr. Altman and those focused more on the technology’s potential benefits.

In 2019, Mr. Altman — who had extensive contacts in Silicon Valley as president of the start-up incubator Y Combinator — became OpenAI’s chief executive. He would own just a tiny stake in the start-up.

“Why is he working on something that won’t make him richer? One answer is that lots of people do that once they have enough money, which Sam probably does,” said Paul Graham, a founder of Y Combinator and Mr. Altman’s mentor. “The other is that he likes power.”

Mr. Altman quickly changed OpenAI’s direction by creating a for-profit subsidiary and raising $1 billion from Microsoft, spurring questions about how that would work with the board’s mission of safe A.I.

Earlier this year, departures shrank OpenAI’s board to six people from nine. Three — Mr. Altman, Dr. Sutskever and Greg Brockman, OpenAI’s president — were founders of the lab. The others were independent members.

Helen Toner, a director of strategy at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology, was part of the effective altruist community that believes A.I. could one day destroy humanity. Adam D’Angelo had long worked with A.I. as the chief executive of the question-and-answer website Quora. Tasha McCauley, an adjunct scientist at the RAND Corporation, had worked on tech and A.I. policy and governance issues and taught at Singularity University, which was named for the moment when machines can no longer be controlled by their creators.

They were united by a concern that A.I. could become more intelligent than humans.

Tensions Mount

After OpenAI introduced ChatGPT last year, the board became jumpier.

As millions of people used the chatbot to write love letters and brainstorm college essays, Mr. Altman embraced the spotlight. He appeared with Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s chief executive, at tech events. He met President Biden and embarked on a 21-city global tour, hobnobbing with leaders like Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India.

Yet as Mr. Altman raised OpenAI’s profile, some board members worried that ChatGPT’s success was antithetical to creating safe A.I., two people familiar with their thinking said.

Their concerns were compounded when they clashed with Mr. Altman in recent months over who should fill the board’s three open seats.

In September, Mr. Altman met investors in the Middle East to discuss an A.I. chip project. The board was concerned that he wasn’t sharing all his plans with it, three people familiar with the matter said.

Dr. Sutskever, 37, who helped pioneer modern A.I., was especially disgruntled. He had become fearful that the technology could wipe out humanity. He also believed that Mr. Altman was bad-mouthing the board to OpenAI executives, two people with knowledge of the situation said. Other employees have also complained to the board about Mr. Altman’s behavior.

In October, Mr. Altman promoted another OpenAI researcher to the same level as Dr. Sutskever, who saw it as a slight. Dr. Sutskever told several board members that he might quit, two people with knowledge of the matter said. The board interpreted the move as an ultimatum to choose between him and Mr. Altman, the people said.

Dr. Sutskever’s lawyer said it was “categorically false” that he had threatened to quit.

Another conflict erupted in October when Ms. Toner published a paper, “Decoding Intentions: Artificial Intelligence and Costly Signals,” at her Georgetown think tank. In it, she and her co-authors praised Anthropic, an OpenAI rival, for delaying a product release and avoiding the “frantic corner-cutting that the release of ChatGPT appeared to spur.”

Mr. Altman was displeased, especially since the Federal Trade Commission had begun investigating OpenAI’s data collection. He called Ms. Toner, saying her paper “could cause problems.”

The paper was merely academic, Ms. Toner said, offering to write an apology to OpenAI’s board. Mr. Altman accepted. He later emailed OpenAI’s executives, telling them that he had reprimanded Ms. Toner.

“I did not feel we’re on the same page on the damage of all this,” he wrote.

Mr. Altman called other board members and said Ms. McCauley wanted Ms. Toner removed from the board, people with knowledge of the conversations said. When board members later asked Ms. McCauley if that was true, she said that was “absolutely false.”

“This significantly differs from Sam’s recollection of these conversations,” an OpenAI spokeswoman said, adding that the company was looking forward to an independent review of what transpired.

Some board members believed that Mr. Altman was trying to pit them against each other. Last month, they decided to act.

Dialing in from Washington, Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area, they voted on Nov. 16 to dismiss Mr. Altman. OpenAI’s outside lawyer advised them to limit what they said publicly about the removal.

Fearing that if Mr. Altman got wind of their plan he would marshal his network against them, they acted quickly and secretly.

What Did Sam Do?

When news broke of Mr. Altman’s firing on Nov. 17, a text landed in a private WhatsApp group of more than 100 chief executives of Silicon Valley companies, including Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and Dropbox’s Drew Houston.

“Sam is out,” the text said.

The thread immediately blew up with questions: What did Sam do?

That same query was being asked at Microsoft, OpenAI’s biggest investor. As Mr. Altman was being fired, Kevin Scott, Microsoft’s chief technology officer, got a call from Mira Murati, OpenAI’s chief technology officer. She told him that in a matter of minutes, OpenAI’s board would announce that it had canned Mr. Altman and that she was the interim chief.

Mr. Scott immediately asked someone at Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond, Wash., to get Mr. Nadella, the chief executive, out of a meeting he was having with top lieutenants. Shocked, Mr. Nadella called Ms. Murati about the OpenAI board’s reasoning, three people with knowledge of the call said. In a statement, OpenAI’s board had said only that Mr. Altman “was not consistently candid in his communications” with the board. Ms. Murati didn’t have answers.

Mr. Nadella then phoned Mr. D’Angelo, OpenAI’s lead independent director. What could Mr. Altman have done, Mr. Nadella asked, to cause the board to act so abruptly? Was there anything nefarious?

“No,” Mr. D’Angelo replied, speaking in generalities. Mr. Nadella remained confused.

Turning the Tables

Shortly after Mr. Altman’s removal from OpenAI, a friend reached out to him. It was Brian Chesky, Airbnb’s chief executive.

Mr. Chesky asked Mr. Altman what he could do to help. Mr. Altman, who was still in Las Vegas, said he wanted to talk.

The two men had met in 2009 at Y Combinator. When they spoke on Nov. 17, Mr. Chesky peppered Mr. Altman with questions about why OpenAI’s board had terminated him. Mr. Altman said he was as uncertain as everyone else.

At the same time, OpenAI’s employees were demanding details. The board dialed into a call that afternoon to talk to about 15 OpenAI executives, who crowded into a conference room at the company’s offices in a former mayonnaise factory in San Francisco’s Mission neighborhood.

The board members said that Mr. Altman had lied to the board, but that they couldn’t elaborate for legal reasons.

“This is a coup,” one employee shouted.

Jason Kwon, OpenAI’s chief strategy officer, accused the board of violating its fiduciary responsibilities. “It cannot be your duty to allow the company to die,” he said, according to two people with knowledge of the meeting.

Ms. Toner replied, “The destruction of the company could be consistent with the board’s mission.”

OpenAI’s executives insisted that the board resign that night or they would all leave. Mr. Brockman, 35, OpenAI’s president, had already quit.

The support gave Mr. Altman ammunition. He flirted with creating a new start-up, but Mr. Chesky and Ron Conway, a Silicon Valley investor and friend, urged Mr. Altman to reconsider.

“You should be willing to fight back at least a little more,” Mr. Chesky told him.

Mr. Altman decided to take back what he felt was his.

Pressuring the Board

After flying back from Las Vegas, Mr. Altman awoke on Nov. 18 in his San Francisco home, with sweeping views of Alcatraz Island. Just before 8 a.m., his phone rang. It was Mr. D’Angelo and Ms. McCauley.

The board members were rattled by the meeting with OpenAI executives the day before. Customers were considering shifting to rival platforms. Google was already trying to poach top talent, two people with knowledge of the efforts said.

Mr. D’Angelo and Ms. McCauley asked Mr. Altman to help stabilize the company.

That day, more than two dozen supporters showed up at Mr. Altman’s house to lobby OpenAI’s board to reinstate him. They set up laptops on his kitchen’s white marble countertops and spread out across his living room. Ms. Murati joined them and told the board that she could no longer be interim chief executive.

To capitalize on the board’s vulnerability, Mr. Altman posted on X: “i love openai employees so much.” Ms. Murati and dozens of employees replied with emojis of colored hearts.

Yet even as the board considered bringing Mr. Altman back, it wanted concessions. That included bringing on new members who could control Mr. Altman. The board encouraged the addition of Bret Taylor, Twitter’s former chairman, who quickly won everyone’s approval and agreed to help the parties negotiate. As insurance, the board also sought another interim chief executive in case talks with Mr. Altman broke down.

By then, Mr. Altman had gathered more allies. Mr. Nadella, now confident that Mr. Altman was not guilty of malfeasance, threw Microsoft’s weight behind him.

In a call with Mr. Altman that day, Mr. Nadella proposed another idea. What if Mr. Altman joined Microsoft? The $2.8 trillion company had the computing power for anything that he wanted to build.

Mr. Altman now had two options: negotiating a return to OpenAI on his terms or taking OpenAI’s talent with him to Microsoft.

The Board Stands Firm

By Nov. 19, Mr. Altman was so confident that he would be reappointed chief executive that he and his allies gave the board a deadline: Resign by 10 a.m. or everyone would leave.

Mr. Altman went to OpenAI’s office so he could be there when his return was announced. Mr. Brockman also showed up with his wife, Anna. (The couple had married at OpenAI’s office in a 2019 ceremony officiated by Dr. Sutskever. The ring bearer was a robotic hand.)

To reach a deal, Ms. Toner, Ms. McCauley and Mr. D’Angelo logged into a day of meetings from their homes. They said they were open to Mr. Altman’s return if they could agree on new board members.

Mr. Altman and his camp suggested Penny Pritzker, a secretary of commerce under President Barack Obama; Diane Greene, who founded the software company VMware; and others. But Mr. Altman and the board could not agree, and they bickered over whether he should rejoin OpenAI’s board and whether a law firm should conduct a review of his leadership.

With no compromise in sight, board members told Ms. Murati that evening that they were naming Emmett Shear, a founder of Twitch, a video-streaming service owned by Amazon, as interim chief executive. Mr. Shear was outspoken about developing A.I. slowly and safely.

Mr. Altman left OpenAI’s office in disbelief. “I’m going to Microsoft,” he told Mr. Chesky and others.

That night, Mr. Shear visited OpenAI’s offices and convened an employee meeting. The company’s Slack channel lit up with emojis of a middle finger.

Only about a dozen workers showed up, including Dr. Sutskever. In the lobby, Anna Brockman approached him in tears. She tugged his arm and urged him to reconsider Mr. Altman’s removal. He stood stone-faced.

Breaking the Logjam

At 4:30 a.m. on Nov. 20, Mr. D’Angelo was awakened by a phone call from a frightened OpenAI employee. If Mr. D’Angelo didn’t step down from the board in the next 30 minutes, the employee said, the company would collapse.

Mr. D’Angelo hung up. Over the past few hours, he realized, things had worsened.

Just before midnight, Mr. Nadella had posted on X that he was hiring Mr. Altman and Mr. Brockman to lead a lab at Microsoft. He had invited other OpenAI employees to join.

That morning, more than 700 of OpenAI’s 770 employees had also signed a letter saying they might follow Mr. Altman to Microsoft unless the board resigned.

One name on the letter stood out: Dr. Sutskever, who had changed sides. “I deeply regret my participation in the board’s actions,” he wrote on X that morning.

OpenAI’s viability was in question. The board members had little choice but to negotiate.

To break the impasse, Mr. D’Angelo and Mr. Altman talked the next day. Mr. D’Angelo suggested former Treasury Secretary Lawrence H. Summers, a professor at Harvard, for the board. Mr. Altman liked the idea.

Mr. Summers, from his Boston-area home, spoke with Mr. D’Angelo, Mr. Altman, Mr. Nadella and others. Each probed him for his views on A.I. and management, while he asked about OpenAI’s tumult. He said he wanted to be sure that he could play the role of a broker.

Mr. Summers’s addition pushed Mr. Altman to abandon his demand for a board seat and agree to an independent investigation of his leadership and dismissal.

By late Nov. 21, they had a deal. Mr. Altman would return as chief executive, but not to the board. Mr. Summers, Mr. D’Angelo and Mr. Taylor would be board members, with Microsoft eventually joining as a nonvoting observer. Ms. Toner, Ms. McCauley and Dr. Sutskever would leave the board.

This week, Mr. Altman and some of his advisers were still fuming. They wanted his name cleared.

“Do u have a plan B to stop the postulation about u being fired its not healthy and its not true!!!” Mr. Conway texted Mr. Altman.

Mr. Altman said he was working with OpenAI’s board: “They really want silence but i think important to address soon.”

Nico Grant contributed reporting from San Francisco. Susan Beachy contributed research.

European Union policymakers on Friday agreed to a sweeping new law to regulate artificial intelligence, one of the world’s first comprehensive attempts to limit the use of a rapidly evolving technology that has far-reaching social and economic implications.

The law, called the AI ​​law, sets a new global benchmark for countries looking to harness the technology’s potential benefits while protecting themselves from its potential risks, such as automating jobs, spreading misinformation online and endangering national security. The law still needs to go through a few final steps before it is adopted, but thanks to the political agreement, its main contours have been laid down.

European policymakers focused on the riskiest uses of AI by companies and governments, including those for law enforcement and the operation of crucial services such as water and energy. Makers of the largest general-purpose AI systems, such as those powering the ChatGPT chatbot, would face new transparency requirements. Chatbots and software that creates manipulated images such as ‘deepfakes’ should make it clear that what people saw was generated by AI, according to EU officials and previous draft laws.

The use of facial recognition software by police and governments would be restricted, subject to certain exceptions in the areas of security and national security. Companies that violate regulations can face fines of up to 7 percent of global turnover.

“Europe has positioned itself as a pioneer and understands the importance of its role as a global standard setter,” said Thierry Breton, the European Commissioner who helped lead the negotiations the agreementsaid a statement.

But even as the law was hailed as a regulatory breakthrough, questions remained about its effectiveness. Many aspects of the policy were not expected to come into effect for twelve to twenty-four months, which is a significant amount of time for AI development. And until the last minute of the negotiations, policymakers and countries fought over the language of policy and how to balance promoting innovation with the need to protect against potential harm.

The deal reached in Brussels took three days of negotiations, including an initial 22-hour session that started Wednesday afternoon and dragged into Thursday. The final agreement was not immediately made public as talks were expected to continue behind the scenes to finalize technical details, which could delay final passage. To vote must be kept in the Parliament and the European Council, which consists of representatives of the 27 countries of the union.

Regulating AI took on urgency after last year’s release ChatGPT, which became a global sensation by demonstrating the advancing capabilities of AI. In the United States recently the Biden administration issued an executive order partly focused on the effects of AI on national security. Britain, Japan and other countries have taken a more hands-off approach, while China has imposed some restrictions on data use and recommendation algorithms.

At stake trillions of dollars in assessed value as AI is predicted to reshape the global economy. “Technological dominance precedes economic dominance and political dominance,” says Jean-Noël Barrot, France’s Digital Minister. said this week.

Europe is one of the countries that has made the furthest progress in regulating AI, having started working on what would become the AI ​​Act in 2018. In recent years, EU leaders have sought to bring a new level of oversight of technology, similar to healthcare regulation. or banking sectors. The region has already done that far-reaching laws were passed related to data privacy, competition and content moderation.

a first design of the AI ​​Act was released in 2021. But policymakers had to rewrite the law as technological breakthroughs emerged. The first version made no mention of general-purpose AI models, such as those powering ChatGPT.

Policymakers agreed to what they called a “risk-based approach” to regulating AI, with a defined set of applications facing the most scrutiny and restrictions. Companies that create AI tools that have the most potential harm to individuals and society, such as in hiring and training, should provide regulators with evidence of risk assessments, breakdowns of what data was used to train the systems, and assurances that the software did. not cause harm, such as perpetuating racist prejudices. Creating and implementing the systems would also require human supervision.

Some practices, such as the random scraping of images Using the Internet to create a facial recognition database would be completely banned.

The debate in the European Union was contentious, a sign of how AI has confused lawmakers. EU officials were divided over how deeply to regulate the newer AI systems, fearing a handicap for European startups trying to overtake U.S. companies like Google and OpenAI.

The law added requirements for makers of the largest AI models to release information about how their systems work and to evaluate for “systemic risks,” Mr. Breton said.

The new regulations will be closely monitored worldwide. They will affect not only major AI developers such as Google, Meta, Microsoft and OpenAI, but also other companies expected to use the technology in areas such as education, healthcare and banking. Governments are also increasingly turning to AI in criminal justice and the allocation of public benefits.

Enforcement remains unclear. The AI ​​Act involves regulators from 27 countries and calls for hiring new experts at a time when government budgets are tight. Legal challenges are likely as companies test the new rules in court. Previous EU legislation, including the landmark digital privacy law known as the General Data Protection Regulation, has been criticised unevenly implemented.

“The EU’s regulatory capacity is in question,” said Kris Shrishak, a senior fellow at the Irish Council for Civil Liberties, who has advised European lawmakers on the AI ​​Act. “Without strong enforcement, this deal will have no meaning.”

While artificial intelligence has been in the spotlight for the past year, technology that can appear to work like human brains has been top-of-mind among researchers, investors and tech executives in Silicon Valley and beyond for more than a decade.

Here are some of the people involved in the origins of the modern AI movement and who influenced the development of the technology.

Sam Altman

Mr. Altman is the CEO of OpenAI, the San Francisco AI lab that created the chatbot ChatGPT that went viral last year and ushered in recognition of the power of generative artificial intelligence. Mr. Altman helped found OpenAI after meeting with Elon Musk about the technology in 2015. At the time, Mr. Altman led Y Combinator, the Silicon Valley startup incubator.

Dario Amodei

Mr. Amodei, an AI researcher who joined OpenAI early, runs the AI ​​start-up Anthropic. A former researcher at Google, he helped shape OpenAI’s research direction but left in 2021 after disagreements over the company’s path. That year he founded Anthropic, which is dedicated to creating secure AI systems.

Bill Gates

Mr. Gates, a founder of Microsoft and for many years the richest man in the world, was long skeptical about how powerful AI could become. Then, in August 2022, he was given a demonstration of OpenAI’s GPT-4, the AI ​​model underlying ChatGPT. After seeing what GPT-4 could do, Mr. Gates became an AI convert. His endorsement helped Microsoft move aggressively to capitalize on generative AI

Demis Hassabis

Mr Hassabis, a neuroscientist, is the founder of DeepMind, one of the most important laboratories of this wave of AI. He received financial backing to create DeepMind from investor Peter Thiel and built a laboratory that produced AlphaGo, an AI software that shocked the world. world in 2016 when it defeated the world’s best player of the board game Go. (Mr. Hassabis was an award-winning chess player as a teenager.) Google bought Britain-based DeepMind in 2014, and Mr. Hassabis is one of the company’s top AI managers.

Geoffrey Hinton

A professor at the University of Toronto, Mr. Hinton, and two of his students were responsible for neural networks, a key underlying technology of this wave of AI. Neural networks fascinated the technology industry, and Google soon agreed to pay Mr. Hinton and his colleagues. crew of $44 million in 2012 to attract them, beating Microsoft and Baidu, a Chinese technology company.

Reid Hoffman

Mr. Hoffman, a former PayPal executive who founded LinkedIn and became a venture capitalist, was — alongside Mr. Musk and Mr. Thiel — part of a group that invested $1 billion in OpenAI.

Elon Musk

Mr. Musk, who runs Tesla and founded SpaceX, helped found OpenAI in 2015. He has long been concerned about the potential dangers of AI. At the time, he was trying to position OpenAI, a nonprofit organization, as a more ethical counterbalance to other tech companies. Mr Musk left OpenAI in 2018 after disagreements with Mr Altman.

Satya Nadella

Mr. Nadella, Microsoft’s CEO, led the company’s investments in OpenAI in 2019 and this year, committing $13 billion to the startup during that period. Microsoft has since been in the thick of AI, incorporating OpenAI’s technology into the Bing search engine and many of its other products.

Larry Page

Mr. Page, who co-founded Google with Sergey Brin, has long been a proponent of AI and its benefits. He pushed for Google’s acquisition of DeepMind in 2014. Mr. Page has a more optimistic view of AI than others, telling Silicon Valley executives that robots and humans will one day live harmoniously.

Peter Thiel

Mr. Thiel, a PayPal executive turned venture capitalist who made much of his fortune from an early investment in Facebook, was a major investor in the early AI labs. He invested money in DeepMind and later in OpenAI.

Eliezer Joedkowski

Mr. Yudkowsky, an Internet philosopher and self-taught AI researcher, has helped create much of the philosophical thinking surrounding the technology. He was a leader in a community who called themselves rationalists or, in later years, effective altruists, and who believed in the power of AI but also feared that the technology could destroy people. Mr. Yudkowsky hosted an annual conference (funded by Mr. Thiel) on AI, where Mr. Hassabis met Mr. Thiel and assured his support for DeepMind.

Mark Zuckerberg

Mr. Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, has been pushing for AI for at least a decade. Recognizing the power of the technology, he tried to buy DeepMind before Google made the winning bid. He then started looking for people to bring AI talent to Facebook.

Reporting was contributed by Cade Metz, Karen Weise, Nico Grant And Mike Isaac.

While artificial intelligence has been in the spotlight for the past year, technology that can appear to work like human brains has been top-of-mind among researchers, investors and tech executives in Silicon Valley and beyond for more than a decade.

Here are some of the people involved in the origins of the modern AI movement and who influenced the development of the technology.

Sam Altman

Mr. Altman is the CEO of OpenAI, the San Francisco AI lab that created the chatbot ChatGPT that went viral last year and ushered in recognition of the power of generative artificial intelligence. Mr. Altman helped found OpenAI after meeting with Elon Musk about the technology in 2015. At the time, Mr. Altman led Y Combinator, the Silicon Valley startup incubator.

Dario Amodei

Mr. Amodei, an AI researcher who joined OpenAI early, runs the AI ​​start-up Anthropic. A former researcher at Google, he helped shape OpenAI’s research direction but left in 2021 after disagreements over the company’s path. That year he founded Anthropic, which is dedicated to creating secure AI systems.

Bill Gates

Mr. Gates, a founder of Microsoft and for many years the richest man in the world, was long skeptical about how powerful AI could become. Then, in August 2022, he was given a demonstration of OpenAI’s GPT-4, the AI ​​model underlying ChatGPT. After seeing what GPT-4 could do, Mr. Gates became an AI convert. His endorsement helped Microsoft move aggressively to capitalize on generative AI

Demis Hassabis

Mr Hassabis, a neuroscientist, is the founder of DeepMind, one of the most important laboratories of this wave of AI. He received financial backing to create DeepMind from investor Peter Thiel and built a laboratory that produced AlphaGo, an AI software that shocked the world. world in 2016 when it defeated the world’s best player of the board game Go. (Mr. Hassabis was an award-winning chess player as a teenager.) Google bought Britain-based DeepMind in 2014, and Mr. Hassabis is one of the company’s top AI managers.

Geoffrey Hinton

A professor at the University of Toronto, Mr. Hinton, and two of his students were responsible for neural networks, a key underlying technology of this wave of AI. Neural networks fascinated the technology industry, and Google soon agreed to pay Mr. Hinton and his colleagues. crew of $44 million in 2012 to attract them, beating Microsoft and Baidu, a Chinese technology company.

Reid Hoffman

Mr. Hoffman, a former PayPal executive who founded LinkedIn and became a venture capitalist, was — alongside Mr. Musk and Mr. Thiel — part of a group that invested $1 billion in OpenAI.

Elon Musk

Mr. Musk, who runs Tesla and founded SpaceX, helped found OpenAI in 2015. He has long been concerned about the potential dangers of AI. At the time, he was trying to position OpenAI, a nonprofit organization, as a more ethical counterbalance to other tech companies. Mr Musk left OpenAI in 2018 after disagreements with Mr Altman.

Satya Nadella

Mr. Nadella, Microsoft’s CEO, led the company’s investments in OpenAI in 2019 and this year, committing $13 billion to the startup during that period. Microsoft has since been in the thick of AI, incorporating OpenAI’s technology into the Bing search engine and many of its other products.

Larry Page

Mr. Page, who co-founded Google with Sergey Brin, has long been a proponent of AI and its benefits. He pushed for Google’s acquisition of DeepMind in 2014. Mr. Page has a more optimistic view of AI than others, telling Silicon Valley executives that robots and humans will one day live harmoniously.

Peter Thiel

Mr. Thiel, a PayPal executive turned venture capitalist who made much of his fortune from an early investment in Facebook, was a major investor in the early AI labs. He invested money in DeepMind and later in OpenAI.

Eliezer Joedkowski

Mr. Yudkowsky, an Internet philosopher and self-taught AI researcher, has helped create much of the philosophical thinking surrounding the technology. He was a leader in a community who called themselves rationalists or, in later years, effective altruists, and who believed in the power of AI but also feared that the technology could destroy people. Mr. Yudkowsky hosted an annual conference (funded by Mr. Thiel) on AI, where Mr. Hassabis met Mr. Thiel and assured his support for DeepMind.

Mark Zuckerberg

Mr. Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, has been pushing for AI for at least a decade. Recognizing the power of the technology, he tried to buy DeepMind before Google made the winning bid. He then started looking for people to bring AI talent to Facebook.

Reporting was contributed by Cade Metz, Karen Weise, Nico Grant And Mike Isaac.