ChatGPT became a global phenomenon, but most people can’t really say who’s behind it. OpenAI’s team story is more winding than its products: a crew that started as a research lab, went through the 2023 boardroom infighting and an exodus of geniuses, then regrouped into the commercialization powerhouse it is today.
This piece introduces the people of OpenAI: the six founders, the current core executives, and those who left to strike out on their own or join a rival. If you want the big-picture view of the company first, start with What kind of company is OpenAI.
Remember this team in one line: its character is written in the story of who stayed and who left.
The Founders: Six Names, Now Scattered to the Winds
OpenAI started in 2015 as a non-profit research lab, and its six most frequently cited co-founders are Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Ilya Sutskever, Greg Brockman, John Schulman, and Wojciech Zaremba.
A decade on, these six have ended up worlds apart. Altman became CEO and the face of this wave of AI; Brockman serves as president and remains at the core. But most of the others have left: Musk stepped off the board in 2018 and later founded xAI; Ilya Sutskever and John Schulman both departed in 2024. In other words, the founders still at the company today are mainly Altman and Brockman.
The Current Core Executives
After Altman returned, OpenAI shifted noticeably from a research-oriented team toward “commercial operations,” bringing in a series of senior executives from outside. Here is the current core lineup (as of mid-2026):
| Role | Person | In one line |
|---|---|---|
| CEO | Sam Altman | Co-founder; briefly ousted in late 2023, back within five days |
| President | Greg Brockman | Co-founder; drives product and technical direction |
| CFO | Sarah Friar | Joined in 2024; former CEO of Nextdoor |
| Chief Scientist | Jakub Pachocki | Succeeded Ilya Sutskever in 2024 |
| CEO of Applications | Fidji Simo | New role created in 2026; former CEO of Instacart |
| Chief People Officer | Arvind KC | Leads talent and organization |
This list reveals a signal: bringing in people like Friar (finance) and Simo (applications and scaling), experts at “growing the product and taking the company public”, means OpenAI’s center of gravity is tilting from “doing research” toward “doing business.”
Two Seats Still Unfilled
Interestingly, OpenAI has two common senior positions that are currently vacant or in an unclear state, and we’ll flag them honestly here:
- CTO: After former CTO Mira Murati left in 2024, OpenAI did not formally appoint another company-level CTO. Technical direction is shared mainly among the chief scientist and others, but the “CTO” title itself is currently vacant.
- COO: Brad Lightcap, who long served as COO, moved to special projects in 2026, and the company has not clearly announced a successor or how his responsibilities will be divided.
These two gaps are themselves worth watching: at a company this large, leaving key roles unresolved often reflects an organization still in rapid reshaping.
The Geniuses Who Left
What draws the most attention to OpenAI is not just who stayed, but who left. Around 2024, a cluster of core safety-focused figures departed together, seen as a microcosm of the company’s “safety vs. commercialization” rift:
| Person | Former role | Where they went |
|---|---|---|
| Ilya Sutskever | Co-founder, chief scientist | Founded Safe Superintelligence (SSI) and became CEO |
| Mira Murati | CTO | Founded the startup Thinking Machines Lab |
| Jan Leike | Safety (alignment) team lead | Joined rival Anthropic |
| John Schulman | Co-founder | Briefly joined Anthropic, then moved to Thinking Machines Lab |
The most intriguing thing about this table is that those who left went on either to start their own ventures or to flow to the most direct competitor; for example, safety lead Jan Leike went to Anthropic, a company that was itself founded by an earlier wave of people who left OpenAI. In a sense, where the talent flows is the undercurrent of this AI race.
The Board and Governance
Beyond the executives, OpenAI has a layer of governance in its board. After the 2023 upheaval and the subsequent restructuring, governance now rests with the non-profit OpenAI Foundation board, whose members include chair Bret Taylor (former co-CEO of Salesforce), Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo, and former NSA director Paul Nakasone.
This board holds real power: in 2023 it directly removed Altman from his post. That five-day reversal of a power struggle is a chapter you can’t skip if you want to understand this team; for the full story, see The boardroom coup that fired Sam Altman, and brought him back.
Penchan’s Take
Pulling this team’s story together, you can see a clear throughline: OpenAI began as a group of idealistic researchers, split over the question of “whether to commercialize at full speed,” sent off a batch of the people who cared most about safety, and then filled the gaps with executives skilled at growing a company.
The people who stayed and the people who left represent two different bets on the future of AI. For readers, the point of knowing these names isn’t to memorize who’s who, it’s to understand what kind of people, and what kind of choices, shaped the OpenAI of today.