Fidji Simo, OpenAI’s No. 2 govt, is stepping down from her full-time function, the Wall Street Journal reports.
In a workers word Thursday, Simo mentioned her ongoing medical depart has confirmed longer and more durable than anticipated, and that she’ll transition to a part-time advisory function as an alternative. Simo joined OpenAI’s board of administrators in 2024 and joined OpenAI in Could 2025 as CEO of Purposes, then a newly created function reporting on to Sam Altman that consolidated the corporate’s enterprise and product operations.
That transfer was built-in right into a wider reporting shift: COO Brad Lightcap, CFO Sarah Friar, and CPO Kevin Weil all started reporting to her, whereas Altman stepped again to give attention to analysis, compute, and security.
Simo first disclosed her well being points in April, when she introduced she was taking medical depart for a relapse of a neuroimmune situation; it was in that very same memo that it was share publicly that Lightcap moved into a brand new “particular initiatives” function and CMO Kate Rouch was leaving the company to give attention to most cancers restoration. Weil has since left the company, too.
Simo got here to OpenAI from Instacart, the place she’d been CEO since 2021 and led the corporate by its 2023 IPO, and earlier than that spent over a decade at Meta, together with operating the Fb app.
Simo’s determination to step again completely leaves Altman looking for a successor proper as OpenAI itself eyes a potential IPO and races to shut the enterprise hole with Anthropic. She’d been broadly seen as a possible candidate to tackle much more duty as soon as OpenAI went public, making this an actual hole for him to fill.
Simo was primarily centered on rising OpenAI’s shopper enterprise. However ChatGPT’s development cooled late final yr, lacking inner income targets, pushing the corporate to lean more durable into coding instruments as an alternative, an space the place it has been and continues, for now, to path Anthropic.
TechCrunch has reached out to OpenAI for extra info.
OpenAI’s govt ranks seem from the skin to be on the skinny facet for a corporation that was most not too long ago assigned an $852 billion valuation. Along with Altman, Lightcap, Friar, and co-founder Greg Brockman (who can be the corporate’s president and was overseeing product technique whereas Simo was out), its bench contains Denise Dresser, who in December joined as the corporate’s chief income officer, overseeing its “world income technique throughout enterprise and buyer success,” per a launch on the time.
It wouldn’t be stunning to see Dresser tackle a extra expansive function, given she beforehand spent two years because the CEO of Slack and, earlier than that, spent 14 years with Slack’s mum or dad firm, Salesforce.
Simo’s departure come in opposition to one other backdrop value understanding, which is OpenAI’s shifting strategy to worker fairness. In April of final yr, the identical month that Simo joined, the corporate shortened its vesting cliff — the ready interval earlier than new hires’ inventory grants start vesting — from the industry-standard 12 months to six months. Then n December, OpenAI eradicated the cliff altogether for brand new hires, letting fairness begin vesting from day one.
The transfer, described internally by Simo as a strategy to let workers “take dangers” with out worry of dropping fairness if let go early, got here amid an escalating AI expertise conflict and displays simply how aggressively OpenAI has been spending to retain workers. The corporate was projected to spend $6 billion on stock-based compensation in 2025 alone.
Not one of the aforementioned exits seem tied to compensation; Simo’s personal fairness would have cleared any cliff nicely earlier than the coverage modified.
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