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.
- Andrej Karpathy — February 2024
Karpathy, an OpenAI co-founder and leading AI researcher, left the company for the second time in February 2024. He said nothing in particular prompted the decision. Karpathy had served as director of AI at Tesla from 2017 to 2022 before rejoining OpenAI in February 2023, making his second stint just one year.
- Daniel Kokotajlo — April 2024
Kokotajlo resigned from OpenAI's governance team in April 2024, publicly stating he had lost trust in OpenAI leadership and their ability to responsibly handle artificial general intelligence. He refused to sign OpenAI's non-disparagement clause, potentially costing him $2 million in equity. His departure signaled growing tensions within the company over AI safety priorities.
- Cullen O'Keefe — April 2024
O'Keefe, a policy researcher on OpenAI's governance team for over four years, departed in April 2024. He announced publicly that he was not under any non-disparagement obligations to OpenAI. O'Keefe now works independently on AI safety and beneficial AGI research.
- Ilya Sutskever — May 2024
Sutskever, OpenAI's co-founder and chief scientist, announced his departure in May 2024 after a turbulent period marked by leadership crises and internal debates about AI safety. In November 2023, Sutskever was one of the board members who voted to fire Sam Altman, then expressed regret days later. In June 2024, he announced Safe Superintelligence Inc., a new AI safety company that raised $1 billion from Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, and other venture firms in September 2024.
- Jan Leike — May 2024
Leike, who co-led OpenAI's superalignment project with Sutskever, announced his departure hours after Sutskever on May 17, 2024. In a public thread, Leike said OpenAI's safety work had taken a backseat to product launches and that he had lost confidence in leadership. He joined rival Anthropic as a machine learning researcher. OpenAI dissolved the superalignment team after both leaders left.
- John Schulman — August 2024
Schulman, an OpenAI co-founder who led the company's alignment sciences team, departed in August 2024 to join Anthropic. Schulman was instrumental in developing reinforcement learning from human feedback, the technique that made ChatGPT possible. His exit removed another of the company's 11 original founders, leaving only Sam Altman and Greg Brockman from the December 2015 launch team.
- Mira Murati — September 2024
Murati, OpenAI's chief technology officer, left the company in September 2024 after more than six years. Murati briefly served as CEO when Sam Altman was forced out in November 2023. In her departure letter, she cited the company passing an important milestone with the releases of speech-to-speech capabilities and the o1 reasoning model but did not specify her reasons for leaving. She later founded Thinking Machines Lab, an AI research company.
- Bob McGrew — September 2024
McGrew, OpenAI's chief research officer, announced he was leaving after eight years on the same day as Murati. McGrew said he was taking a break but would continue supporting the new lead of OpenAI's research team for two months. His departure alongside Murati raised immediate questions about coordination.
- Barret Zoph — September 2024
Zoph, OpenAI's vice president of research, announced his resignation on September 25, 2024, the same day as Murati and McGrew. The simultaneous departure of three senior research and product leaders in a single day marked the company's most concentrated leadership loss to that point. All three described their decisions as independent.
- Tim Brooks — October 2024
Brooks, who co-led Sora before Peebles took over, left OpenAI in October 2024 for Google DeepMind. He later moved to Meta's Superintelligence Labs. Brooks' research at Sora explored large-scale generative models that simulate the physical world, work that became foundational for the AI video generation industry.
- Miles Brundage — October 2024
Brundage, a policy researcher at OpenAI since 2018, left in October 2024 and announced that OpenAI was dissolving its AGI readiness team, which he had advised. His departure signaled a shift in OpenAI's approach to policy and preparedness work around artificial general intelligence. Brundage wrote that his research would be more impactful externally.
- Lilian Weng — November 2024
Weng, who served as OpenAI's VP of research and safety since August 2024 and previously led the company's safety systems team, announced her departure in November after seven years. Her last day was November 15. Under her leadership, OpenAI's safety systems unit had grown to more than 80 scientists and researchers. She later joined Fellows Fund as a Distinguished Fellow in December 2024.
- Liam Fedus — March 2025
Fedus, OpenAI's vice president of research for post-training, left in March 2025 to launch an AI-powered materials science startup called Periodic Labs. Fedus was one of the core creators of ChatGPT and GPT-4o. OpenAI confirmed it would invest in and partner with his new company, which aims to use AI to accelerate scientific discovery in materials research.
- Shengjia Zhao — July 2025
Zhao, a key architect of ChatGPT and GPT-4, became chief scientist at Meta's Superintelligence Lab in July 2025, reporting directly to Mark Zuckerberg. Zhao made groundbreaking contributions to the infrastructure of synthetic data and dialogue models. His departure gave Meta a top-level architect who experienced the entire iteration cycle from GPT-3 to GPT-4.
- Julia Villagra — August 2025
Villagra resigned as OpenAI's chief people officer in August 2025, just months after being promoted to the role. Her departure removed a key executive responsible for talent retention and internal culture during a period of sustained attrition. At least 12 senior executives left OpenAI in 2025 alone.
- Hannah Wong — December 2025
Wong, OpenAI's chief communications officer, announced her departure in late 2025 for her next chapter. She said Lindsey Held Bolton would lead the communications team on an interim basis while the company searched for a new chief communications officer. Wong did not specify where she would go next.
- Lawrence Summers — November 2025
Summers resigned from OpenAI's board of directors in November 2025. Summers had joined the reconstituted board in November 2023 alongside Bret Taylor after Sam Altman's brief ouster and reinstatement. His departure reduced the board's external oversight and economic policy expertise at a time when regulatory scrutiny of AI companies was intensifying.
- Kate Rouch — April 2026
Rouch, OpenAI's marketing chief, stepped down in early April 2026 to focus on her cancer recovery. Her departure came weeks before the latest wave of executive exits and reflected the ongoing health and personal pressures facing senior leaders at the company.
- Kevin Weil — April 17, 2026
Weil, who led OpenAI for Science, announced his departure on Friday after two years at the company. The team had released GPT-Rosalind, a model designed to accelerate life sciences research and drug discovery, one day before Weil's announcement. Weil had previously deleted a social media post claiming GPT-5 solved 10 previously unsolved mathematical problems after the claim fell apart under scrutiny from mathematicians.
- Bill Peebles — April 17, 2026
Peebles, the researcher behind AI video tool Sora, announced his exit on Friday. Peebles joined OpenAI in 2023 and helped lead Sora's launch that briefly pushed the app to the top of Apple's App Store. Sora, which faced reported compute costs exceeding $1 million daily, was taken offline last month. In his departure message, Peebles wrote that Sora was a project that could not have happened anywhere else and argued that cultivating entropy is the only way for a research lab to thrive long-term.
- Srinivas Narayanan — April 17, 2026
Narayanan, chief technology officer for B2B Applications, announced on Friday that he would leave at the end of this week. In posts on X and LinkedIn, he described the decision as the right time to step back following recent product launches. Narayanan plans to return to India to spend time with his aging parents before deciding what comes next. OpenAI has not announced a successor to his role, which oversaw the engineering teams responsible for the company's most commercially successful products.
Damilare Odedina
