According to news on November 21, local time in the United States on Monday, Ilya Sutskever, a board member and chief scientist of the artificial intelligence research company OpenAI, expressed regret for his involvement in the firing of CEO Sam Altman. Since then, questions about the future of OpenAI have intensified. To make matters worse, OpenAI's customers are looking for an exit, suggesting the company could be losing a lot of business and eventually decline.

Over the weekend, more than 100 OpenAI customers contacted Anthropic, a startup that has raised billions in funding from Amazon and Google in recent months. Additionally, Google (Google Cloud) and OpenAI rival startup Cohere have been contacted. Many OpenAI customers are also considering switching to Microsoft's Azure service, which provides copies of OpenAI models and other models, according to people familiar with the matter.

However, OpenAI investors on Monday still held out hope that Altman would return to OpenAI, according to people familiar with the matter.

Meanwhile, another person familiar with the matter said that long before Altman was fired, OpenAI's major customer Morgan Stanley planned to shift more artificial intelligence software to rely on Microsoft's Azure, which hosts OpenAI's version of ChatGPT. Morgan Stanley had been in regular contact with Anthropic before Altman was fired, according to two people familiar with the matter.

The ongoing crisis at OpenAI has put more pressure on the Wall Street firm to maintain a diversified selection from other artificial intelligence providers, people familiar with the matter said. Morgan Stanley is one of OpenAI’s earliest and most important corporate customers, and this relationship was mainly brokered by Altman.

Just as customers are considering leaving, OpenAI employees are preparing to rebel against the board of directors. On Monday, most of OpenAI's more than 700 employees, including Sutzkefer, senior product chief Mira Murati and co-founder John Schulman, signed an open letter threatening to resign and join Microsoft if the board did not reinstate Allman.

Companies in technology, finance and other industries that have tied their artificial intelligence product roadmaps to OpenAI's technology were rattled when the startup's leadership crisis surfaced over the weekend. Many are particularly concerned that OpenAI's board of directors appears not to care about the startup's commercial interests, including those of its customers or shareholders, but instead focuses on its nonprofit mission of prioritizing "security" over rapid technological advancement, according to people familiar with the matter.

While some of OpenAI's customers have previously been in talks with other artificial intelligence startups, recent discussions have focused on Altman's firing and its potential impact on their businesses. Financial firms in particular have expressed concerns that their businesses could be harmed if Altman is ousted over possible data privacy issues, this person said.

Microsoft, which has invested more than $10 billion in OpenAI in exchange for access to its technology, will be a major beneficiary of the turmoil. Microsoft already sells copies of OpenAI models on its Azure cloud service, a product that directly competes with OpenAI. Microsoft salespeople have been working in recent months to persuade existing OpenAI customers to switch to Azure, saying it has more security and compliance guarantees, according to people familiar with the business.

Earlier media reports stated that Morgan Stanley signed an agreement with Microsoft last month to use Microsoft's Azure OpenAI service. Morgan Stanley's partnership with OpenAI dates back to 2021, when OpenAI began building a customized copy of its GPT-4 model, which was trained on Morgan Stanley's proprietary market intelligence data, to build a chatbot that could quickly answer questions from financial managers and provide actual information about the market. OpenAI has previously cited Morgan Stanley as a prime example of how its technology can help a large, established company expand its business.

Competitors are doing everything possible to find ways to benefit from the great changes that have taken place in OpenAI. On Friday afternoon, when OpenAI announced it was firing Altman, employees at AWS and Anthropic began discussing how to win business from OpenAI's largest customer. Anthropic has received billions of dollars in investment from AWS.

AWS has established a dedicated team to work with Anthropic and respond to inquiries from OpenAI customers. Over the weekend, AWS and Anthropic discussed how to market their services to several of OpenAI's customers, including Snap, Morgan Stanley and Wall Street trading firm JaneStreet. At least one AWS salesperson said the companies have pressured OpenAI customers to act quickly. Anthropic did not respond to a request for comment, and Amazon did not immediately comment.

Smaller OpenAI customers are also starting to look at other options. RabiGupta, CEO and co-founder of San Francisco-based AI sales startup EvaBot, is using OpenAI to test new AI tools on behalf of large clients, including companies with billions in revenue. He has begun exploring other options, and he will begin to diversify beyond the platform.

"We're feeling very anxious and unsure of what's going to happen," Gupta said. The company has made an access request to Anthropic and plans to try out some open source models like Google Bard and MetaLlama2. The entrepreneur used OpenAI’s GPT-4 to analyze unstructured data, such as research reports and earnings meeting minutes, looking for information to improve the effectiveness of his sales prospecting calls.

The upheaval at OpenAI prompted Gupta to rethink the way he built his business, including not relying on a single technology platform. He said: "This is not our priority. Before, my whole idea was to get revenue, get customers, and then focus on training our own big language model. But now, training our own big model has become a top priority."

Waseem Daher, CEO of accounting startup Pilot, another client, said over the weekend that there were long-term questions about the impact of Altman and Brockman (OpenAI co-founder, former president and chairman) leaving OpenAI, but there had been no immediate impact on his business. Pilot uses OpenAI's technology to help customers with accounting and preparing financial statements.

"This upheaval is full of drama and has real impacts," Dach said. "However, drama is still the main factor at the moment. From a practical impact perspective, OpenAI's application programming interface is still accessible."