How do we explain OpenAI’s executive exodus?

OpenAI is the original frontier lab. Its latest publicly released model, GPT-5.6, is one of the most capable and efficient on the market. Its desktop app for agentic coding and workplace tasks has seen its user base grow by about 15 million subscribers in the last two months.

OpenAI has also already filed to go public. So why are all the executives heading out the door?

Since the turn of the year, more than a dozen executives have departed, including CEO Sam Altman’s top deputy , the chief operating officer , a chief revenue officer , its chief marketing officer , as well as several different team leads . Yesterday, news broke that Chris Malone, the company’s head of data centers, left the company last week after joining in March 2025.

Some of those departures have come due to health issues, and others are were due to reorganization that occurred as Altman sought to cut expensive “side projects” and focus on revenue-generating opportunities.

Still, Malone’s unexplained departure is striking, if only because OpenAI’s primary advantage over rivals like Anthropic or SpaceX is its investment in compute. OpenAI noted to TechCrunch that the departure follows a reorganization of the company’s infrastructure team, which is now led by vice president Sachin Katti, whereas Malone once reported directly to president Greg Brockman. It’s not surprising that a senior executive might leave a company if he suddenly finds himself several rungs further down the ladder.

The frontier lab declined to comment on broader changes at the company, but it seems apparent that Brockman is reasserting his leadership at the company. As co-founder and president, he played important roles building OpenAI’s early infrastructure, but he was relieved of most management responsibilities in 2019, when Altman became CEO.

After that, Brockman played a disruptive role at the company, according to Karen Hao’s book “Empire of AI.” His contributions to individual projects like GPT-4 were undeniable, but he also seeded internal rivalries that helped kick off the “Blip” in 2023, when the company’s board briefly ousted Altman as CEO. Brockman would take a brief sabbatical in 2024 before returning to the company.

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 the company’s API and app offerings, told TechCrunch last week.