Fidji Simo steps down from OpenAI’s no. 2 role

Fidji Simo, OpenAI’s No. 2 executive, is stepping down from her full-time role, the Wall Street Journal reports.

In a unit enactment Thursday, Simo said her ongoing aesculapian permission has proven longer and harder than expected, and that she’ll modulation to a part-time advisory relation instead. Simo joined OpenAI’s committee of directors successful 2024 and joined OpenAI successful May 2025 arsenic CEO of Applications, past a recently created relation reporting straight to Sam Altman that consolidated the company’s concern and merchandise operations.

That determination was integrated into a wider reporting shift: COO Brad Lightcap, CFO Sarah Friar, and CPO Kevin Weil each began reporting to her, portion Altman stepped backmost to absorption connected research, compute, and safety.

Simo archetypal disclosed her wellness issues successful April, erstwhile she announced she was taking aesculapian permission for a relapse of a neuroimmune condition; it was successful that aforesaid memo that it was stock publically that Lightcap moved into a caller “special projects” relation and CMO Kate Rouch was leaving the company to absorption connected crab recovery. Weil has since left the company, too.

Simo came to OpenAI from Instacart, wherever she’d been CEO since 2021 and led the institution done its 2023 IPO, and earlier that spent implicit a decennary astatine Meta, including moving the Facebook app.

Simo’s determination to measurement backmost permanently leaves Altman searching for a successor close arsenic OpenAI itself eyes a imaginable IPO and races to adjacent the endeavor spread with Anthropic. She’d been wide seen arsenic a apt campaigner to instrumentality connected adjacent much work erstwhile OpenAI went public, making this a existent spread for CEO Sam Altman to fill.

Simo was chiefly focused connected increasing OpenAI’s user business. But ChatGPT’s maturation cooled precocious past year, missing interior gross targets, pushing the institution to thin harder into coding tools instead, an country wherever it has been and continues, for now, to way Anthropic.