Samuel Harris Altman, born on April 22, 1985, in Chicago, is an American entrepreneur and investor who has been chief executive of OpenAI since 2019. He co-founded the organization in 2015 as a nonprofit research laboratory with Greg Brockman, Elon Musk and others. OpenAI's release of ChatGPT in November 2022 accelerated the spread of generative AI and made Altman one of the most closely watched figures in the technology industry.

Altman studied computer science at Stanford University for two years before leaving in 2005 to co-found Loopt, a location-based social networking app that Green Dot Corporation bought in March 2012 for $43.4 million. He became a partner at the startup accelerator Y Combinator in 2011 and its president in February 2014, succeeding Paul Graham, then left in March 2019 to run OpenAI full time. In 2019 he also co-founded Tools for Humanity, the company behind the eye-scanning Worldcoin identity and currency project, which has faced regulatory action in several countries. He chairs the fusion company Helion Energy and was chairman of the fission company Oklo until April 2025.

His leadership has been contested. On November 17, 2023, OpenAI's board removed him, saying he "was not consistently candid in his communications"; after more than 700 employees threatened to leave, he returned on November 21 with a reconstituted board. On October 28, 2025, OpenAI adopted a new structure that made its for-profit arm OpenAI Group PBC and renamed the nonprofit the OpenAI Foundation. In April 2026 The New Yorker published an investigation by Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz asking whether Altman can be trusted, and in May a jury rejected Musk's lawsuit against OpenAI after finding that he had waited too long to sue.

Altman speaks often about AI risk and regulation. He testified on AI oversight before a Senate Judiciary subcommittee on May 16, 2023. In September 2026 he publicly agreed with Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei's call to slow the development of advanced AI and advocated embedding independent evaluators inside AI companies. In an October 2026 interview with Politico, he argued that the world should accept some harms in exchange for broad access to the technology's benefits. That month Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier explained on NewsNation why he was suing Altman and OpenAI.

Altman's place in UFO and UAP coverage comes from other people's remarks rather than his own work. In April 2026 UFO-focused social media accounts circulated a line, attributed to an unnamed former OpenAI official and tied to the New Yorker investigation, describing the company as building "portals" for "summoning aliens" in the United States, China and the Middle East; the posts presented it as a claim about extraterrestrials, although as quoted the remark appears to describe the company's AI work. In July 2026 author Annie Jacobsen said in a widely shared podcast clip that Altman had not known ChatGPT could be made to find classified information until she told him. Beyond those mentions Altman has no documented role in UAP research or disclosure; his public significance rests on leading OpenAI through the commercial rise of generative AI.