OpenAI lost three senior executives on Friday, April 17, as Srinivas Narayanan, the company's CTO for B2B Applications, Kevin Weil, who led OpenAI for Science, and Bill Peebles, the researcher behind AI video tool Sora, all announced their departures. The exits mark the latest wave in a two-year pattern of high-level turnover that has seen 21 key leaders and researchers leave the San Francisco company since early 2024.
Narayanan joined OpenAI in April 2023 and was named CTO of B2B Applications in September 2025, leading engineering teams responsible for ChatGPT and the developer API platform. In his departure announcement, he said he would return to India to spend time with his ageing parents. Weil and Peebles shared news of their exits in separate posts on X on Friday. OpenAI is decentralising its science division to bring research closer to product and infrastructure teams, according to a company spokesperson.
The departures follow a pattern that began in early 2024 with the exit of co-founder and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, who left after a boardroom conflict with CEO Sam Altman. Since then, the company has lost multiple co-founders, its chief technology officer, its chief research officer, and safety researchers who publicly criticized OpenAI for prioritizing commercial products over AI safety. Only two of OpenAI's 11 original founders remain at the company preparing for a potential IPO valued at $157 billion in its most recent funding round.
