OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has denied allegations of sexual abuse made by his sister Ann Altman in a lawsuit filed Monday. She claims her older brother sexually “groomed and manipulated” her beginning around the time she was 3.
The lawsuit alleges that Sam committed acts of rape, molestation, sodomy, and battery on Ann, who goes by Annie, “several times a week” for nearly a decade, with the final acts taking place when he was an adult and she was still a minor.
Sam Altman called the allegations “utterly untrue” in a joint statement posted Tuesday on X with his mother, Connie, and his brothers Jack and Max. The family referenced Annie’s history of accusing family members of wrongdoing over the years and said her claims have “evolved drastically over time.”
According to the family, Annie has mental health challenges, and relatives have tried to support her with financial and medical help. In the post on X, the family said Annie refuses conventional treatment, lashes out at family members, and “continues to demand more money from us.”
In the lawsuit, Annie claims the sexual abuse has caused her post-traumatic stress disorder, lost wages, and “a loss of enjoyment of a normal life.” The suit, filed in the U.S. District Court in the Eastern District of Missouri, where the Altman children were raised, seeks damages of more than $75,000 and legal fees.
While this is the first time Annie has gone to court with her allegations, she publicly accused Sam and their brother Jack Altman, an entrepreneur and investor, of “sexual, physical, emotional, verbal, financial, and technological abuse” in 2021.
“I feel strongly that others have also been abused by these perpetrators,” Annie wrote on X at the time, asking for others to join her in pursuing legal justice. She posted again about the alleged abuse two years later, writing: “I’m not four years old with a 13 year old ‘brother’ climbing into my bed non-consensually anymore.”
Annie, who lives in Hawaii, graduated from Tufts University and has a website called All Humans Are Human. The site is home to her projects, including The HumAnnie, an “interactive stand-up-comedy-philosophy-show-with-a-song, about how no one ever fully ‘figures out’ how to human”; a collection of blog posts, including “An Open Letter to the EMDR Trauma Therapist Who Fired Me for Doing Sex Work”; and “Hey Sad Scared Tech Bros,” a parody of the 2005 hit song “Hey There Delihah” by Plain White T’s.
Last year, Annie self-published a book called “HumAnnie Grief Poems,” inspired by the seven stages of grief.
In a 2023 profile of Sam Altman in New York magazine, Annie said he had been her favorite brother and is probably autistic like her, but in a “computer-math way.”
“I’m more of the humanity, humanitarian, justice-y way,” she said.
The profile details a fraught relationship. Annie said a year after their father’s death in 2018, she asked Sam and their mother for financial help after quitting her job at a dispensary because of an injured Achilles tendon, but they refused.
“I was just at such a loss, in such a state of desperation, such a state of confusion and grief,” Annie told New York.
In the X statement denying the claims in the lawsuit, the family says they have tried many ways to support Annie and help her find stability without enabling harmful behaviors.
“To give a sense of our efforts, we have given her monthly financial support, directly paid her bills, covered her rent, helped her find employment opportunities, attempted to get her medical help, and have offered to buy her a house through a trust (so that she would have a secure place to live, but not be able to sell it immediately),” the statement says. “Via our late father’s estate, Annie received monthly financial support, which we expect to continue for the rest of her life.”
In a tweet from last year, Annie said her father’s trust was withheld from her for six years, while she was “sick and houseless and starting sex work for survival.”
Recently, Annie has reposted tweets by Poornima Ramarao, the mother of Suchir Balaji, the OpenAI whistleblower who was found dead in his San Francisco apartment in November.
The posts nudge at conspiracy theories claiming the 26-year-old died under suspicious circumstances, even though San Francisco authorities ruled the death a suicide and police said they found “no evidence of foul play.”
“#JusticeForSuchir” Annie tweeted in December, joining the software engineer’s family and a coalition of right-wing pundits who claim Balaji was murdered at the behest of OpenAI and other artificial intelligence companies.
The Altman family’s X post denying Annie’s claims has become a magnet for additional conspiracy theories around Balaji’s death.