Fidji Simo steps down from OpenAI full-time role

OpenAI executive Fidji Simo is stepping down from her full-time role at the company and will move into a part-time advisory position, according to TechCrunch, citing a staff note and earlier reporting by The Wall Street Journal. Simo, who joined OpenAI in May 2025 as CEO of Applications, said her medical leave has been “longer and harder than expected” following a relapse of a neuroimmune condition. The role she held was newly created and reported directly to CEO Sam Altman.

Simo’s appointment was designed to consolidate OpenAI’s business and product operations at a moment when the company was trying to turn extraordinary consumer reach into predictable revenue. TechCrunch reports that the COO, CFO and CPO began reporting to her after she arrived, while Altman stepped back to focus on research, compute and safety. With Simo now stepping away permanently, Altman is again looking for a senior executive who can run the commercial machine while the technical organisation pursues larger models and more compute.

The timing lands amid a broader reshuffle that looks less like a clean handover than a company absorbing human limits under maximum external pressure. In the same memo, TechCrunch says, OpenAI disclosed that COO Brad Lightcap had moved into a “special projects” role, while CMO Kate Rouch was leaving to focus on cancer recovery. Kevin Weil, OpenAI’s chief product officer, has also left, according to the report. For a company selling reliability to enterprises—and seeking to keep regulators and partners confident about governance—continuity at the top becomes part of the product.

Operationally, Simo had been associated with pushing OpenAI’s consumer business, a bet that depends on sustained user growth and a path to monetisation that does not alienate users or trigger political backlash. TechCrunch reports that ChatGPT’s growth cooled late last year and that the company missed internal revenue targets, prompting a harder push into coding tools—an area where OpenAI is said to trail Anthropic “for now.” That kind of pivot is expensive: it requires new product cadence, new sales motion, and often new risk tolerance as models are embedded deeper into workflows.

Simo was widely seen as a likely candidate to take on more responsibility if OpenAI pursued an IPO, TechCrunch notes, and the company is considering going public. Instead, the person brought in to professionalise the business side is leaving as the company tries to convince customers that its tools will be supported for years, not quarters.

Simo joined OpenAI after leading Instacart through its IPO and after more than a decade at Meta, where she ran the Facebook app. OpenAI is now back to searching for a successor while its most public product remains the face of a fast-moving regulatory and competitive fight.