Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI Inc., during a media tour of the Stargate AI data center in Abilene, Texas, USA, on Tuesday, September 23, 2025.
Kyle Grillot | Bloomberg | Getty Images
OpenAI is on the defensive ahead of Sunday’s Super Bowl.
Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman and other senior executives at the artificial intelligence startup took to social media this week to try to address concerns about the company’s partnerships, lawsuits, research activities and information gathering from archrival Anthropic.
In a podcast appearance Thursday, Altman said it often feels like a “hurricane of madness” is sweeping through the company, and that sometimes management has to “revise” the narrative.
“It’s a strange way to live,” Altman said. “I don’t know of any private company that has ever been in the news or under the microscope like this, but in some ways it’s frustrating.”
OpenAI launched its chatbot ChatGPT in 2022 and has since become one of the fastest growing commercial organizations on the planet. But the company has come under intense scrutiny since last year, when it struck more than $1.4 trillion in infrastructure deals, including $100 billion in partnerships. Nvidia It rocked the tech industry.
Questions about the partnership’s status began swirling a week ago, when the Wall Street Journal reported that the partnership was “on ice.”
An OpenAI spokesperson told the Journal that the company is “actively working on the details” of the partnership.
But speculation about a possible rift continued on Monday after Reuters reported that OpenAI was “not satisfied” with some of NVIDIA’s chips. A spokesperson told CNBC that Nvidia “powers the majority of OpenAI’s inference fleet, delivering the best performance per dollar of inference.”
In response to this report, Mr. Altman began expressing his opinion directly.
“We love working with NVIDIA, they make the best AI chips in the world, and we hope to be a huge customer for a very long time,” Altman wrote in a post to X on Monday. “I don’t understand where this madness is coming from.”
Former Sachin Katti intel The CTO, who joined OpenAI in November to help build the infrastructure, also issued a statement. In a post on X on Monday, he called OpenAI and Nvidia’s efforts “fundamental.”
“NVIDIA is our most important partner in both training and inference, and our entire compute fleet runs on NVIDIA GPUs,” Katti wrote. “This is not a vendor relationship. It’s a deep and ongoing co-design.”
CNBC has reached out to OpenAI for additional comment.
Elon Musk waves to the crowd at the 56th World Economic Forum (WEF) Annual Meeting in Davos, Switzerland, January 22, 2026.
Dennis Bariboos | Reuters
By Tuesday, Altman turned his attention to another battle: OpenAI’s ongoing lawsuit with Elon Musk.
Musk co-founded OpenAI in 2015, left the company in 2018, and launched competitor xAI in 2023. The following year, it sued OpenAI and Altman for alleged breach of contract and financial damages.
OpenAI has dismissed Musk’s efforts as part of a “harassment campaign,” and the case is expected to go to trial in April.
“I’m really looking forward to having Elon swear in Christmas in April in a few months!” Altman wrote in a post about X on Tuesday.
Musk’s xAI filed separate lawsuits last year against OpenAI and Apple, accusing the companies of engaging in an “anticompetitive scheme” to thwart rivals.
Jason Kwon, OpenAI’s chief strategy officer, called the lawsuit “frivolous” in a post on X on Tuesday and shared several screenshots of the new court filing. According to the screenshots, the only documents xAI has produced are “a small number of corporate policies,” and the company “extensively uses defunct messaging tools such as Signal and XChat.”
“New court filings demonstrate how Elon engaged in maximum truth deletion,” Kwon wrote. “I wonder what he’s hiding.”
The same day, Mark Chen, chief research officer at OpenAI, shared a post rejecting the idea that the startup is prioritizing an “increasingly product-centric agenda” over research.
OpenAI was founded in 2015 as a nonprofit research institute, but after the successful launch of ChatGPT, the company released several consumer and enterprise products. OpenAI declared a “code red” in December, halting several projects to focus on improving its chatbots, and the company has seen a number of senior researchers leave in recent months.
Jerry Turek, OpenAI’s vice president of research, announced his decision to leave the company in January. “I want to explore the types of research that are difficult to do with OpenAI,” Tworek said in a post on X.
Chen said the majority of OpenAI’s computing is still allocated to basic research rather than product milestones. He said he and OpenAI’s chief scientist Jakub Paciocki are “the fewest people in the world who are pushing product progress over research progress.”
“Fundamental research has been at the core of OpenAI since the beginning, and we are currently running a research program that includes hundreds of exploratory projects, much like the ones that led to breakthroughs in inference models,” Chen wrote on Tuesday.
Dario Amodei, co-founder and CEO of Anthropic, speaks at the 56th World Economic Forum (WEF) Annual Meeting in Davos, Switzerland, January 20, 2026.
Dennis Bariboos | Reuters
By Wednesday, OpenAI executives were preoccupied with an entirely new problem.
The company’s rival, Anthropic, announced its first Super Bowl campaign, subtly criticizing OpenAI’s recent decision to begin testing ads within ChatGPT.
OpenAI announced last month that free users and ChatGPT Go subscribers in the US would begin seeing ads. The company says the ads will be clearly labeled and displayed at the bottom of the chatbot’s answers, and will not affect ChatGPT answers.
Anthropic is taking a different approach, announcing Wednesday that it plans to keep its chatbot Claude ad-free. The Super Bowl campaign revolves around this decision, and will air a 60-second pregame ad and a 30-second in-game ad featuring the tagline, “Advertising is coming to AI, but not to Claude.”
Altman and OpenAI Chief Marketing Officer Kate Ruesch weren’t happy.
In a post on X, Altman said the commercial was “funny” but “patently disingenuous” and that OpenAI “certainly would not advertise in the way Anthropic portrays it.”
“We’re not stupid and we know users will reject it,” Altman wrote. “I think it’s common knowledge that Anthropic Doublespeak uses deceptive advertising to criticize theoretical deceptive advertising that is not real, but the Super Bowl ad is not what I would expect.”
Rouch shared another post about X criticizing Anthropic’s campaign.
“The real betrayal isn’t advertising; it’s control,” Ruesch said. “Anthropic believes that powerful AI should be kept tightly controlled in small rooms in San Francisco or Davos. That’s too dangerous for you… We don’t believe that.”
Both Altman and Ruesch noted that OpenAI has more free users than Anthropic, which Altman said means OpenAI has a “different type of problem than they do.”
Altman later dismissed the altercation as a “sideshow” during a podcast appearance on Thursday.
“People are excited about food fights,” he says.
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