They had to negotiate away the non-profit structure of OpenAI. Sam used that as a marketing and recruiting tool, but it had outlived that and was only a problem from then on.

For OAI to be a purely capitalist venture, they had to rip that out. But since the non-profit owned control of the company, it had to get something for giving up those rights. This led to a huge negotiation and MSFT ended up with 27% of a company that doesn’t get kneecapped by an ethical board.

In reality, though, the board of both the non-profit and the for profit are nearly identical and beholden to Sam, post–failed coup.