The short answer is no, Sam Altman is not running for president. But folks searching on Google might be confused as to why the description for his X (formerly Twitter) account seems to suggest that he is:

There's a lot of news about Sam Altman right now, given the announcements around his departure from Open AI. But one snippet stands out if you search for it on Google - the description that accompanies his X account. It current says the following snippet:

I am running for President as a Democrat in 2024. My campaign will be about four main things. First and foremost, it will be about the economy. We have to make ...

At first glance, the snippet seems to suggest that Sam Altman is announcing his campaign on the same day as the news about his departure. But in reality, this is a bad job by the Google bot, not something that Sam Altman himself tweeted. What appears to be happening is that Google is picking up a quote from Congressman Dean Phillips, which is a tweet that Altman himself quoted in a response:

Because Altman quote tweeted this original tweet, Google seems to associate the Tweet with Altman's main page, hence the original snippet. The original tweet from Congressman Dean Phillips can be found here.

Google's systems rely on automatically selecting featured descriptions and snippets, which is ultimately the source of the error here. That said, I think this news can be shocking to folks who aren't paying close attention, and it's up to Google to decide how to improve their systems.

We at Kapwing, an online video editor, are huge fans (and customers) of OpenAI, and like many others in the tech community, were shocked when the news of Altman's departure came out. We were doubly shocked to see a snippet of him announcing a campaign, and wanted to share our investigation to help others stay informed. We hope this helps clear things up - Altman isn't running for President right now - he just replied to Phillips' announcement.