[edanm]

That tweet thread confirms what I said, at least in a roundabout way. Per the next tweets:

> Equity is part of negotiated compensation; this is shares (worth a lot of $$) that the employees already earned over their tenure at OpenAI.

> Employees are not informed of this when they're offered compensation packages that are heavy on equity.

That makes it sound like it's something that they agreed to when accepting their compensation, perhaps unknowingly.

And Kelsey's article links to this LessWrong post about one of the employees that refused this deal and gave up massive amounts of equity, and he writes this:

> To clarify: I did sign something when I joined the company, so I'm still not completely free to speak (still under confidentiality obligations). But I didn't take on any additional obligations when I left.

So again, there are some things that they signed on joining OpenAI, perhaps non-standard things. Now they're asked to sign something more.

I'm not sure of the structure of what they signed before and this article doesn't get into it, but I maintain that there is no legal mechanism to tell someone "sign this or I take away something you already received". There has to be more to the story than the way I've seen it presented so far.

And for the record, I'm very much in the worried-about-AI-safety camp, I have a lot of issues with OpenAI in that and other regards, and I am absolutely willing to believe that the "more to the story" that I gesture at above is still OpenAI being really bad here - it might be that the conditions negotiated with employees made this "we take away your equity" a loophole they weren't aware of, or that OpenAI has some mechanism to make equity effectively zero out somehow, or something.

I'm not saying OpenAI is in the right, at all. I'm saying that the story as told so far doesn't fit with how reality works, and I'm interested to know more details. That's all.

[robbie-c]

> I'm not sure of the structure of what they signed before and this article doesn't get into it, but I maintain that there is no legal mechanism to tell someone "sign this or I take away something you already received". There has to be more to the story than the way I've seen it presented so far.

It's in that whole collection of tweets, but essentially the contract which you sign on joining says that if you leave and you don't sign the exit paperwork then you lose your equity. You aren't told what is in the exit paperwork at this point.

When you leave, the exit paperwork contains the non-disparagement clause.

Whether or not this is legally enforceable, no idea, IANAL. It does sound like enough of a threat that most people would just sign though

[edanm]

> It's in that whole collection of tweets, but essentially the contract which you sign on joining says that if you leave and you don't sign the exit paperwork then you lose your equity. You aren't told what is in the exit paperwork at this point.

Yeah, that sounds like the kind of shenanigans that I imagine happened (I didn't see it in the article and I may have missed it among the tweets).

This is the kind of thing you really should never agree to as an employee signing on, though I wouldn't be surprised if many never really knew about it. I also doubt it's enforceable.

> Whether or not this is legally enforceable, no idea, IANAL. It does sound like enough of a threat that most people would just sign though

I agree, although the amounts of money here are probably large enough that they should just have lawyers involved giving them advice.