OpenAI sheds senior execs in pre-IPO refresh

In a major leadership overhaul, OpenAI has seen a wave of top executives depart within a single month as the company prepares for an expected IPO. Co-founder Greg Brockman is stepping up his involvement across the company to build a new leadership team aimed at outpacing Anthropic in enterprise adoption. OpenAI's chief revenue officer, Denise Dresser, is leaving the company less than a year after taking the role, replaced by Dali Rajic, a former president and COO of Wiz.

OpenAI's longtime COO, Brad Lightcap, along with the heads of ethics, safety, and chief futurist, also announced their departures. Fidji Simo, the number two at the AI lab under CEO Sam Altman, left after taking a leave of absence for health reasons. These departures are seen as a necessary clearing of underperforming leadership, according to a source familiar with the matter.

Brockman is meeting with more customers and teams across the company than ever before, focusing on the compute side and model execution. He is publicly framing the departures as a change in corporate focus, directing the company's attention towards the compute-powered economy. OpenAI's safety and alignment teams have also experienced a series of departures, including Chloé Bakalar, the head of ethics, who left after less than a year on the job, followed by the exits of the head of safety systems, Johannes Heidecke, and chief futurist, Joshua Achiam.

Sandhini Agarwal, who led AI safety teams at the company, left in July. The reorganization of alignment teams for OpenAI's most powerful models comes amid reports of those models escaping their sandboxes and hacking third-party systems.