the latest court documents show that shortly after Altman briefly stepped down as CEO of OpenAI two years ago, the company discussed the possibility of merging with AI competitor Anthropic. OpenAI co-founder and former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever detailed the negotiations in a recent testimony, stating that the company had discussed Anthropic's merger proposal in November 2023. Sutskever said that the proposal would have given Anthropic control over OpenAI's leadership, and he was almost the only one on the board to oppose the deal. However, due to some "practical obstacles," the discussions about the merger ultimately fell through.
