More than a dozen executives have left OpenAI this year as Greg Brockman's influence grows

A wave of departures

OpenAI has lost more than a dozen executives since the start of the year, according to TechCrunch, a list that includes the chief operating officer, a chief revenue officer, the chief marketing officer, CEO Sam Altman's top deputy and several team leads.

The churn coincides with an otherwise strong stretch for the company. TechCrunch reports that GPT-5.6, its most recent public model, is among the most capable and efficient on the market, and that its desktop app for agentic coding and workplace tasks added roughly 15 million subscribers over the past two months. OpenAI has also filed to go public.

Some exits stemmed from health issues, TechCrunch says, while others followed an internal reorganization in which Altman shut down expensive side projects to concentrate on revenue-generating work.

The data center chief's exit

The latest departure became public this week: Chris Malone, OpenAI's head of data centers, left the company last week after joining in March 2025. TechCrunch calls the move striking because heavy investment in compute is OpenAI's main advantage over rivals such as Anthropic and SpaceX.

OpenAI told TechCrunch that Malone's exit followed a restructuring of the infrastructure team, which is now led by vice president Sachin Katti. Malone had previously reported directly to president Greg Brockman, and TechCrunch notes it would not be surprising for a senior executive to leave after finding himself several rungs down the hierarchy.

Brockman reasserting control

The company declined to comment on broader changes, but TechCrunch reads the reshuffle as Brockman reclaiming influence. The co-founder and president helped build OpenAI's early infrastructure, then lost most management responsibilities in 2019 when Altman became CEO.

According to Karen Hao's book "Empire of AI," Brockman later became a disruptive force internally: his contributions to projects such as GPT-4 were significant, but he also fueled rivalries that contributed to the 2023 "Blip," when the board briefly removed Altman as CEO. Brockman took a sabbatical in 2024 before returning.

The infrastructure and product organizations now 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.

TechCrunch frames this as a familiar startup cycle playing out in reverse: experienced operators like the now-departed Fidji Simo and Kevin Weil were brought in to scale the business, and founder influence is now rising again. Brockman was previously known for building out Stripe's business and, inside OpenAI, for championing go-to-market efforts.

The IPO overhang

The public listing looms over everything else. OpenAI said in June it had confidentially filed going-public disclosures with the SEC. TechCrunch notes that companies filing confidentially typically reach the trading floor in about five months, and SpaceX did so in under two, yet OpenAI's IPO is now not expected until 2027.

The delay carries a cost. Listing would require OpenAI to disclose its financials at roughly the same time as Anthropic, which is also preparing a public debut. TechCrunch reports that Anthropic is believed to be profitable, while OpenAI's losses are believed to be widening even as its revenue grows. Altman has publicly described the past 12 months as bad, which TechCrunch says fits the picture of a company that overreached with its filing and is now restructuring to earn more and carry less overhead.

Why it matters

The turnover spans commercial leadership, core infrastructure and the executive bench itself, raising an obvious question for a company headed to public markets: whether the churn reflects disciplined streamlining or deeper instability at the industry's most prominent lab. The timing sharpens the stakes, since OpenAI's disclosures will likely land beside a rival believed to be profitable, and its listing is already tracking far slower than the norm. Malone's departure matters beyond optics because compute infrastructure is the company's clearest edge over competitors. And with Brockman consolidating control, the power structure in place since 2019 is shifting — a dynamic that the company's own history suggests can be productive as well as destabilizing.