Some OpenAI employees are still feeling uneasy and looking for other jobs despite Sam Altman's return, report says

• Sam Altman is back in charge of OpenAI but some employees are still feeling nervous, per Semafor.
• The silence around Altman's ousting is reportedly causing staffers to look elsewhere for work.
• One OpenAI staffer said while employees are "happy" Altman's back, they are "still in the dark."

OpenAI's CEO Sam Altman may be back in charge but some employees are still feeling uneasy.

Semafor reported that the board's continued silence on what led to Altman's shock ousting has made some employees nervous.

One senior OpenAI staffer told Semafor that while employees were "happy" that Altman was back as chief, they were "still in the dark about a lot of things."

"We've been told repeatedly that the heart of the board's dispute with Sam was not over AI safety, but we haven't been told what that is. So things still feel shaky," they said.

The lack of clear information is pushing some employees to look outside the company for job opportunities, per Semafor. According to one of the outlet's sources, rival AI company Cohere has received several inquiries from OpenAI employees in recent days.

Several other companies, including Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, have been open about their attempts to poach talent from the buzzy AI company.

In a post on X last week, the software company CEO offered immediate employment and matched compensation to any OpenAI researcher interested in joining Salesforce's Einstein Trusted AI research team.

The chaos at OpenAI has reportedly been a boon to rivals in other ways.

AI companies Hugging Face and Cohere told CNBC they've had more customer inquiries following Altman's ousting and reinstatement as CEO.

"I think a lot of companies, organizations now are kind of wondering about the risk about outsourcing their AI to just one AI provider," Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue told the outlet.

Representatives for OpenAI did not immediately respond to Business Insider's request for comment, made outside normal working hours.