OpenAI AGI chief Fidji Simo steps down after 3-month medical leave

Fidji Simo, OpenAI's head of artificial general intelligence, is leaving her full-time role after a three-month medical leave, becoming the latest senior executive to depart the ChatGPT-maker as it prepares for an initial public offering.

"Three months ago, I had to go on medical leave after a severe exacerbation of a chronic illness I've lived with for seven years," Simo wrote on X. "During that time, it became clear that the road to recovery would be much longer and more complex than I had anticipated."

The 40-year-old French-American executive, who joined OpenAI in mid-2025 as CEO of Applications before becoming AGI chief, will transition to a part-time advisor role. She has postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome, a neuroimmune condition she has lived with since 2019. Simo said she had repeatedly ignored advice to slow down over seven years of illness, driven by a belief that opportunities were precious.

Simo's departure adds to a string of senior leadership changes at OpenAI, which has filed for a high-stakes IPO. Chief operating officer Brad Lightcap stepped down earlier this year to focus on special projects, while chief marketing officer Kate Rouch also left her role to focus on her health, with plans to return in a more narrowly scoped role. President Greg Brockman has since taken charge of product strategy and scaling, leading four pillars including core product, enterprise industries, consumer applications and infrastructure.

Before joining OpenAI, Simo served as chief executive of Instacart, steering the grocery delivery platform to profitability after joining in 2021. Prior to that, she spent a decade at Meta, where she championed the company's pivot to video. Her career trajectory — from a fishing family in the Mediterranean port of Sete, France, to the top ranks of Silicon Valley — made stepping back particularly difficult, she said.

"OpenAI in particular felt like a role that my entire career had been building toward," Simo wrote. Despite leaving her full-time position, she said she remains invested in AI's potential to improve healthcare and will continue contributing to OpenAI as an advisor.

OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman wrote on X that he was "really sad about this" and grateful for Simo's contributions. "We all wish her the best for a speedy recovery. This sucks," he said.

The leadership turnover comes as OpenAI pursues an IPO, with investor scrutiny on the company's ability to retain top talent as competition intensifies from Google, Anthropic and Meta in the AI race. Simo's departure follows a broader reorganization in May in which Brockman combined ChatGPT and Codex into a unified agentic platform, prioritizing the company's AI agent goals. In a memo to staff, Brockman wrote that the reorganization would help the company invest in a single agentic platform and create one unified experience for all users.

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