Fidji Simo is leaving her role as CEO of Applications at OpenAI and will transition to a part-time advisory position, citing a recovery that proved longer and harder than expected. She had joined OpenAI in May 2025 in the newly created role reporting directly to Sam Altman, consolidating the company's business and product operations; COO Brad Lightcap, CFO Sarah Friar, and CPO Kevin Weil all began reporting to her, while Altman stepped back to focus on research, compute, and safety.
Simo first disclosed her health issues in April, when she announced a medical leave for a relapse of a neuroimmune condition. In that same memo, Lightcap moved into a new "special projects" role and CMO Kate Rouch was leaving to focus on cancer recovery. Weil has since left the company as well.
Simo came to OpenAI from Instacart, where she had been CEO since 2021 and led the company through its 2023 IPO, and before that spent over a decade at Meta, including running the Facebook app. Her permanent step-back leaves Altman searching for a successor as OpenAI eyes a possible IPO and races to close the enterprise gap with Anthropic. She had been widely seen as a likely candidate to take on even more responsibility once OpenAI went public.
Simo was primarily focused on growing OpenAI's consumer business, but ChatGPT's growth cooled late last year, missing internal revenue targets and pushing the company to lean harder into coding tools — an area where it trails Anthropic.