OpenAI ditched the only 2 women on its board. So far, it's replacing them with men.

• OpenAI announced a new male-dominated board after Sam Altman won the battle to return as CEO.
• Helen Toner and Tasha McCauley are stepping down but fellow coup member Adam D'Angelo is staying on.
• The lack of diversity in its current selection has sparked a debate online.

OpenAI's board is looking very male-heavy right now following Sam Altman's shock return.

The company said in a statement late on Tuesday that Helen Toner and Tasha McCauley, two members of the board that voted to oust Sam Altman on Friday, will step down and be replaced by a new board comprised of ex-Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor — the board chair, former treasury secretary Larry Summers, and Adam D'Angelo.

That makes D'Angelo, the CEO of question and answer site Quora, the only survivor of the board that oversaw OpenAI's descent into chaos — which also included Ilya Sutskever who ultimately defected to Altman's side on Monday.

While the board is expected to grow to around nine people, with both Altman and Microsoft — its biggest investor — angling for seats, the lack of diversity in its initial line-up has sparked debate online.

It has also raised fears about diversity in the wider AI industry, especially as the models produced by companies such as OpenAI have previously been accused of producing biased responses.

'Please, more representation and balance'

The departure of Toner and McCauley has put the makeup of OpenAI's new board in the spotlight.

Emily Bell, a founding director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, wrote in a post on X: "OpenAI fires women on the board — board chair who oversaw fuck up stays."

She pointed out that Summers once said that men are innately better at science than women and associated with Jeffrey Epstein after he was a registered sex offender — something Summers says he "deeply regrets."

"I guess we know that the revolutionary new future of humanity will be in the most ethical of man hands," Bell said.

One of OpenAI's main rivals also weighed in on the lack of diversity on the new board.

"Bret (Taylor) is fantastic & given he made Google maps the AGI should know where it is going," posted Stability AI CEO Emad Mostaque, who also praised Summers and D'Angelo.

"But please, more representation & balance here — powerful white guys are < 0.01% of the world," he said.

A report from Deloitte and the Alliance for Board Diversity (ABD) from earlier this year found that more than half of Fortune 500 board seats were held by white men, though the number of women and people from underrepresented racial and ethnic groups has gradually increased over the past few years.

Within the private sector, research from Crunchbase in 2022 showed that women held 16% of board seats among more than 660 companies they analyzed.

Altman's clash with the board

OpenAI's former board members have repeatedly refused to say why they fired Altman in the first place.

They have all been heavily criticized for the decision, with venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, OpenAI's first investor, accusing them of putting both the company and the wider AI boom at risk.

The New York Times reported that Altman and Toner had also clashed in the months before his firing, with Toner writing a paper Altman perceived as being critical of OpenAI's approach to AI safety.

And both Toner and McCauley have faced social media backlash following Altman's departure.

Toner in particular has been accused of "never having a job in their life" and being a "fanatic zealot with delusions of grandeur.".

'The more diversity we have in AI, the better'

The debate around diversity is especially heated in AI companies, where issues of bias are seen as one of the main real-world dangers posed by artificial intelligence.

Angela Hoover, co-founder and CEO of San Francisco-based AI search engine company Andi, previously told Business Insider that the lack of diversity in this industry is a concern.

"While AI is heavily male-dominated and we still see a big gender disparity at AI events in San Francisco, we're hopeful this will change as more women become involved in AI companies. The more diversity we have in AI, the better," she said.

OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Insider, made outside normal working hours.