Fidji Simo is stepping down from OpenAI’s number. 2 turns

Fidji Simo, OpenAI’s No. 2 CEO, will step down from her full-time role, The Wall Street Journal reported.

In a memo to staff Thursday, Simo said her ongoing medical leave has proven longer and more difficult than expected, and that she will be transitioning to a part-time consulting role instead. Simo joined OpenAI’s Board of Directors in 2024 and joined OpenAI in May 2025 as Chief Applications Officer, then a newly created position reporting directly to Sam Altman that has unified the company’s business and product operations.

Her appointment came with a broader shift in reporting: COO Brad Lightcap, CFO Sarah Friar, and CPO Kevin Weil all began reporting to her, while Altman stepped back to focus on research, computing and safety.

Simo first It has been detected Her health problems in April, when she announced that she would take medical leave due to a relapse of a neuroimmune disease; The same memo publicly announced that Lightcap was transitioning to a new role in “special projects” and that marketing director Kate Roche was Leaving the company To focus on cancer recovery. It has been woeful ever since He left the companyalso.

Simo comes to OpenAI from Instacart, where she had been CEO since 2021 and led the company through its IPO in 2023, and before that she spent more than a decade at Meta, including running the Facebook app.

Simo’s decision to step back permanently leaves Altman searching for a successor while OpenAI itself eyes a potential IPO. She was widely viewed as a potential candidate to take on more responsibility once OpenAI went public, making this a real void for him to address.

Simo has primarily focused on growing OpenAI’s consumer business. But ChatGPT’s growth slowed late last year, and it missed internal revenue targets, leading the company to rely more heavily on programming tools instead, an area in which it was, and still is, lagging behind Anthropic.

TechCrunch has reached out to OpenAI for more information. Shortly after the story ran in the newspaper, Simo shared the news directly On X, and then Altman He respondedalso on

Simo’s announcement comes on a busy news day for OpenAI. Earlier on Thursday, the company launched its new product GPT-5.6 model family — Sol, Terra, and Luna — along with a new agent called ChatGPT Work, designed to handle multi-step office tasks like drafting documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. Both versions are framed by OpenAI as directly targeting humans.

From the outside, OpenAI’s executive ranks appear slim for a company that recently received an $852 billion valuation. In addition to Altman, Lightcap, Friar, and co-founder Greg Brockman (who is also the company’s president and has been overseeing product strategy during Simo’s absence), her bench includes Dennis Dresser, who joined in December as the company’s chief revenue officer, overseeing “global revenue strategy across the organization and customer success,” according to a release at the time.

It wouldn’t be surprising to see Dresser take on a more expansive role, given that she previously spent two years as CEO of Slack, and before that, she spent 14 years with Slack’s parent company, Salesforce.

Simo’s departure comes against another backdrop worth understanding: OpenAI’s changing approach to employee rights. In April last year, the same month Simo joined, the company shortened the vesting cliff — the waiting period before new employee stock awards begin to vest — from an industry-standard 12 months to 6 months. Then in December, OpenAI removed this gap entirely for new employees, allowing shares to start vesting from day one.

The move, which Simo described internally as a way to allow employees to “take risks” without fear of losing equity if they are let go early, came amid an escalating AI talent war and reflects how aggressively OpenAI is spending to retain employees. The company was expected to spend $6 billion on stock-based compensation in 2025 alone.

None of the above mentioned exits appear to be related to compensation. Executive stock packages are typically negotiated individually and can have very different vesting terms.