TW child sexual assault
Have you heard? The CEO of a huge AI company has been accused of child sexual assault by his sister (Hao, 2025), and almost nobody is talking about it because she is coded as crazy.
I am, of course, referring to Sam Altman and his younger sister, Annie Altman. Annie has publicly said that Sam sexually abused her when she was a small child and he was an older child. The Altman family has heavily implied that she is crazy and therefore the allegations must be untrue (and also how dare she. But also CRAZY amirite). Plus like, Sam is gay so why would he even? <SARCASM> Since we ALL know child sexual abusers, who are themselves children at the time of the abuse, definitely only choose prey for sibling incest assault based on their eventual adult sexual orientation, since sex crimes are ONLY about attraction and not, like, power </SARCASM>
This is me going on the record as saying I believe her. I believe Annie Altman. As a sexual assault survivor and someone very estranged from their Tech Bro sibling1, as well as someone who has been treated for PTSD (quite successfully treated, actually), I very much get the dynamic where you are dismissed as unstable by the family leaders when you present behavior consistent with someone who has undergone trauma, often within the very family system that now dismisses you.
They cause your trauma, and then say you can’t be believed about your trauma because of how symptoms of that trauma materially manifest. You can’t win. It’s wearisome but not the point right now.
The point is that this dude, who has been accused by Annie Altman of child sexual abuse to crickets by a fawning corporate media apparatus2, now runs a huge corporate entity (is OpenAI officially a corporation yet? they were milking that nonprofit industrial complex energy SO GOOD for a while there) that is taking over, well, lots of things. And will continue to do so.
Stories are beginning to emerge of sexually exploitative and abusive content emanating from tools that OpenAI controls, as well as from tools of other big AI companies, content which is reaching users who are children (National Center on Sexual Exploitation, 2025). Which is then followed by predictable gaslighting. They Would Never. Are You Sure It Happened Really. It Wasn’t What You Thought. Or my favorite: “Legacy Media Lies” (Mussa and Luke, 2025).
This is called gaslighting, my friends, and abuse survivors are familiar with it. That it’s wrapped in fashy rhetoric doesn’t change this. It’s just on a much larger scale now, and we all are the subjects who now get to undergo trauma within this larger system, while being told we are crazy.
You can believe Annie Altman or not. But you are subject to that brand of gaslighting and abuse now, and they will be watching how you react and determining how to further dismiss you based on that.
- This is not me saying that my surviving sibling did what Annie Altman accuses Sam Altman of. I am not saying that. ↩︎
- Karen Hao has covered Annie Altman’s life and her accusations and insights about Sam and the larger Altman family in her book Empire of AI. Hao does not conclude that she believes Annie or she doesn’t, but she also doesn’t treat her as an automatically crazy person just because Annie presents with (and sometimes communicates via) consistent symptoms of trauma, which sadly makes Hao’s treatment of the topic stand out a great deal. Hao also draws connections between what Annie says and patterns of behavior on the part of Sam Altman in his corporate and public endeavors. ↩︎
References
Hao, K. (2025). Empire of AI: Dreams and nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI. Penguin Press.
Mussa, I. & Luke, M. (2025, October 29). This mom’s son was asking Tesla’s Grok AI chatbot about soccer. It told him to send nude pics, she says. CBC News. https://www.cbc.ca/news/investigates/tesla-grok-mom-9.6956930
National Center on Sexual Exploitation. (2025, 30 October). OpenAI, xAI, and MetaAI Must Restrict Minors from AI Chatbots as Character.AI Makes Similar Commitment, Says NCOSE. https://endsexualexploitation.org/articles/openai-xai-and-metaai-must-restrict-minors-from-ai-chatbots-as-character-ai-makes-similar-commitment-says-ncose
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