The abuse allegedly began when she was three and Mr Altman was 12, according to the lawsuit, which was submitted on January 6 to a US District Court in the Eastern District of Missouri.
According to the claim, the abuse occurred “several times per week” starting with oral sex and progressing to penetration. Abuse left Ms Altman with “severe emotional distress, mental anguish, and depression”, which she says still affects her today.
The lawsuit further stated that the last alleged abuse occurred when she was still a minor and Mr Altman was an adult.
A jury trial and damages of more than $75,000 (£60,100) are being requested in the claim.
Together with his mother and two brothers, Mr Altman refuted the accusations in a joint statement on X, stating that “all of these claims are utterly untrue”.
“Caring for a family member who faces mental health challenges is incredibly difficult. This situation causes immense pain to our entire family.”
Mr Altman led OpenAI through a period of immense growth. Thanks to its hugely popular ChatGPT chatbot, which hit 100 million regular users within weeks of its launch, the San Francisco start-up was at the centre of an AI boom. Microsoft injected $10bn in funding into the company, and it was reportedly valued at $90bn.
The success saw Mr Altman become one of the most recognisable faces in tech, shooting to stardom alongside the likes of celebrity entrepreneurs Elon Musk, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg.
So who is the young tech entrepreneur and what are the other controversies that have affected his career?
A childhood tech prodigy and a young LGBT pioneer
By nursery school, Altman understood the system behind area codes, and learned to program and disassemble a Macintosh at eight
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As a young Jewish boy growing up in St Louis, Missouri, it didn’t take long for Mr Altman’s technical prowess to become apparent.
By nursery school, he understood the system behind area codes, and had learned to program and disassemble a Macintosh at eight, according to the New Yorker.
Having a Mac computer also helped Mr Altman come to terms with his sexuality. “Growing up gay in the Midwest in the two-thousands was not the most awesome thing,” he the New Yorker. “And finding AOL chat rooms was transformative. Secrets are bad when you’re 11 or 12.”
He came out to his parents at 16. After a Christian group boycotted an assembly about sexuality at his school, Mr Altman announced that he was gay to all the pupils, and asked whether they wanted it to be a repressive or welcoming place.
“What Sam did changed the school,” Mr Altman’s college counsellor told the New Yorker. “It felt like someone had opened up a great big box full of all kinds of kids and let them out into the world.”
The Stanford dropout to tech entrepreneur pipeline
Altman spent two years at Stanford, before following the well-trodden tech entrepreneur path of dropping out of college to work full-time
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Mr Altman went on to enrol at Stanford University. He spent two years studying computer science, before following the well-trodden tech entrepreneur path of dropping out of college to work full-time.
He founded Loopt with two of his classmates, a mobile app that told your friends where you were. One of Mr Altman’s co-founders at Loopt, Nick Sivo, was also his boyfriend – the two dated for nine years.
The first summer after Mr Altman dropped out of college, he worked so tirelessly that he got scurvy. Loopt was part of the first group of eight companies at start-up accelerator Y Combinator. Each start-up got $6,000 per founder – Loopt was in the same batch as Reddit.
As CEO, Mr Altman raised more than $30m in venture capital for Loopt. However, the app failed to gain traction with enough users.
“We had the optimistic view that location would be all-important,” Mr Altman told the New Yorker.
Mr Altman and his co-founders sold Loopt in 2012 for $43m.
Shortly after selling Loopt, Mr Altman and Sivo split up. “I thought I was going to marry him – very in love with him,” Mr Altman admitted.
Taking over at the helm of start-up investor Y Combinator
In 2014, at the age of 28, Altman was chosen by Y Combinator founder Paul Graham to succeed him as president of the company
Andrew Caballero-Reynolds / AFP via Getty Images
After Loopt, Mr Altman founded a venture fund called Hydrazine Capital, and raised $21m. He invested 75 per cent of that money into YC companies, the parent company of Y Combinator.
In 2015, Mr Altman was featured on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list for venture capital at age 29.
But it seems that Mr Altman has some history when it comes to shock departures from company boards. By 2019, Mr Altman had been relegated to chairman at YC. The following year, he said he would be leaving the board and continuing as an adviser – a role which he never formally assumed. As of early 2020, he was no longer affiliated with YC.
Former Bloomberg journalist Eric Newcomer wrote: “Altman went from president, to chairman, to being an adviser, to having no affiliation with Y Combinator without much detailed reporting from the press. YC successfully swept, what seems to be a real schism, under the rug.”
The role of a lifetime: OpenAI and ChatGPT
Under Altman’s leadership, OpenAI released popular generative AI tools to the public, including DALL-E and ChatGPT
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After stepping away from YC, Mr Altman took on what would become the role of a lifetime, when he joined OpenAI as CEO.
Shortly after joining, at a StrictlyVC event in 2019, Mr Altman was asked how OpenAI planned to make a profit, and he said the “honest answer is we have no idea”. But by the summer of 2019, he had helped raise $1bn from Microsoft.
After Mr Altman took over as CEO, and after the investment from Microsoft, the company started focusing on developing natural language processing. Under Altman’s leadership, OpenAI released popular generative AI tools to the public, including DALL-E and ChatGPT.
“Ctrl, Altman, Delete”: a role at Microsoft before returning to OpenAI
Nadella was briefly hired at Microsoft
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In a move that sent shockwaves through Silicon Valley, Mr Altman was abruptly sacked as OpenAI CEO in 2023 after a statement by the board saying that it “no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI”.
“We are grateful for Sam’s many contributions to the founding and growth of OpenAI,” a statement from OpenAI’s board said. “At the same time, we believe new leadership is necessary as we move forward.”
Almost as abruptly as he had been fired, Mr Altman was then back at OpenAI’s offices in talks about his potential rehiring. But those talks appeared to have fallen through.
Mr Nadella said that Mr Altman would instead be hired at Microsoft. The company appointed Altman and OpenAI’s former president and co-founder, Greg Brockman, who had recently resigned, to lead a new advanced AI team at the company.
“We’re extremely excited to share the news that Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, together with colleagues, will be joining Microsoft to lead a new advanced AI research team. We look forward to moving quickly to provide them with the resources needed for their success,” Mr Nadella wrote on X at the time.
However, the company was faced with a growing revolt among staff angry at Mr Altman’s ousting. A letter from employees to the board said that the directors had “undermined our mission and company” by the way they let go of Altman and Brockman. According to reports, 747 employees out of 770 had called for the board to quit as of Monday evening.
So, after five days of chaotic boardroom drama, Mr Altman confirmed he had been reinstated as CEO of Open AI, under the supervision of a new board. Mr Brockman returned alongside him.
OpenAI have recently hit back at Elon Musk’s claims
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Mr Musk was a co-founder of OpenAI when it started out as a nonprofit in 2015 and currently leads a rival AI business called xAI.
Mr Musk has publicly chastised OpenAI for supposedly straying from its initial goal since leaving the board in 2018. Mr Musk is initiating legal action to prevent OpenAI from becoming a for-profit business.
He re-filed the complaint in federal court after withdrawing the initial one in a state court in San Francisco in June.
In a blog post, OpenAI retaliated against Mr Musk, asserting that in 2017, Musk “not only wanted, but actually created, a for-profit” to operate as the business’s suggested new structure.
Sexual abuse allegations of childhood abuse
In a lawsuit filed on January 6, Annie Altman claims her elder brother sexually assaulted her for nine years in the 1990s and 2000s, according to the Saint Louis Post Dispatch.
The lawsuit echoes assertions Ms Altman made in 2021 on social media, but this is the first time she has taken him to court.
According to the Altman family, the lawsuit’s allegations are untrue.
They wrote on X that they are worried for Ms Altman’s wellbeing because she has struggled with mental health issues for a number of years. According to the Altmans, they have made numerous attempts to assist her, including providing her with financial support for a number of years.