Hundreds of staff at leading artificial intelligence company OpenAI have threatened to quit and join Microsoft after the sudden firing of the company's co-founder Sam Altman. The OpenAI staff said they would follow Altman, who said he would be starting an artificial intelligence (AI) subsidiary at Microsoft after his surprise removal from the company that created the ChatGPT chatbot, which led to the rapid rise in AI tech. In a letter, some of OpenAI's most senior staff members threatened to leave the company if the board was not replaced. "The process through which you terminated Sam Altman and removed [co-founder and former president] Greg Brockman from the board has jeopardized all of this work and undermined our mission and company," the letter, first released to the technology news outlet Wired, reads. "Your conduct has made it clear you did not have the competence to oversee OpenAI". "Microsoft has assured us that there are positions for all OpenAI employees at this new subsidiary should we choose to join."

OpenAI was in open revolt on Monday with more than 500 employees signing an open letter threatening to leave unless the board resigns and reinstates Sam Altman as CEO, along with cofounder and former president Greg Brockman. Altman was controversially fired by the board on Friday. "The process through which you terminated Sam Altman and removed Greg Brockman from the board has jeopardized all of this work and undermined our mission and company" the letter reads. "Your conduct has made it clear you did not have the competence to oversee OpenAI." Remarkably, the letter's signees include Ilya Sutskever, the company's chief scientist and a member of its board, who has been blamed for coordinating the boardroom coup against Altman in the first place.