OpenAI's executive exodus deepens as it nears an IPO

OpenAI is the original frontier AI lab. Its latest publicly released model, GPT-5.6, ranks among the most capable and efficient on the market, and its desktop app for agentic coding and workplace tasks has added about 15 million subscribers in the past two months. The company has also already filed to go public. Yet more than a dozen executives have departed since the turn of the year, including CEO Sam Altman’s top deputy, the chief operating officer, a chief revenue officer, the chief marketing officer, and several team leads. Most recently, Chris Malone, OpenAI’s head of data centers, left the company last week after joining in March 2025.

OpenAI attributes some of the departures to health issues and to a reorganization as Altman moves to cut expensive “side projects” and focus on revenue-generating work. Malone’s exit, though unexplained, is notable because OpenAI’s compute investment is central to its edge over rivals like Anthropic or SpaceX. OpenAI said Malone’s departure follows a reorganization of the infrastructure team, now led by vice president Sachin Katti, whereas Malone had previously reported directly to president Greg Brockman.

OpenAI declined to comment on broader changes, but the shift suggests Brockman is reasserting his leadership. As co-founder and president, he helped build OpenAI’s early infrastructure but was relieved of most management responsibilities in 2019 when Altman became CEO. According to Karen Hao’s book “Empire of AI,” Brockman later played a disruptive role at the company, seeding internal rivalries that helped trigger the 2023 board upheaval that briefly ousted Altman as CEO — the “Blip.” Brockman took a brief sabbatical in 2024 before returning. Today, the infrastructure and product teams report to him. “I like to say that everyone reports to Greg at the end of the day,” Thibault Sottiaux, who leads OpenAI’s API and app offerings, told TechCrunch.

The prospect of an IPO looms over the reshuffle. OpenAI said in June it had filed confidential going-public disclosures with the SEC, which would help fund its capital-intensive infrastructure needs but also means disclosing its financials around the same time as Anthropic, which is reportedly profitable while OpenAI is reportedly seeing its losses grow alongside its revenue. OpenAI’s IPO isn’t expected until 2027; a company that files confidentially usually reaches the trading floor within about five months, and SpaceX did so in less than two.

Altman’s own comments about a difficult past 12 months, paired with the internal reorganization, fit a narrative in which OpenAI overreached with its IPO filing and is now reshaping itself to raise revenue and cut costs. Some departed executives, like Fidji Simo and Kevin Weil, were experienced operators brought in to help scale the company toward a public listing — a common pattern at startups. Brockman’s rising influence, following a career that included building out Stripe’s business, looks like the next phase of that same cycle.

Why it matters

With so much senior turnover, OpenAI needs someone to fill the leadership vacuum while it trims costs and boosts revenue ahead of an IPO that will invite direct financial comparisons with Anthropic. Brockman’s growing authority may be arriving at exactly the moment OpenAI needs a steady hand on both infrastructure and go-to-market execution.