OpenAI has quietly reshuffled its power structure, and one man now sits at the center of it: cofounder and president Greg Brockman. According to The Verge AI, a wave of high-level departures over the past year has left Brockman running day-to-day operations, giving him authority over nearly every part of the company’s commercial machine. He’s still officially number two behind CEO Sam Altman. But when it comes to how OpenAI actually runs, he’s the big boss.
This matters because it tells you where OpenAI is heading right before one of the most anticipated IPOs in tech.
What happened
Brockman’s title hasn’t changed in years. His job has. The Verge AI reports that his purview expanded dramatically as executives streamed out the door, especially starting in April.
The departures piled up fast:
- Bill Peebles, former head of Sora
- Kevin Weil, VP of OpenAI’s science arm
- Srinivas Narayanan, CTO of B2B applications
- Kate Rouch, CMO, and Fidji Simo, CEO of AGI deployment, both citing medical reasons
- Denise Dresser, CRO, gone after just eight months
- Brad Lightcap, longtime COO turned head of special projects, leaving to start something new
When Simo went on leave, Brockman took over all things product, including OpenAI’s super app push. A later reorg handed him the company’s entire “scaling” arm too. Simo’s official exit, just weeks after OpenAI filed to go public, locked the arrangement in place.
One detail stands out. When Dresser left, the press release quoted Brockman rather than Altman. He said the company would “build out the full system to make AI broadly useful for people and businesses.” When the president speaks for the company instead of the CEO, that’s a signal.
Why it matters
Big shifts in an executive’s scope usually point to strategy, not just staffing. Harrison Rolfes, a senior research analyst at PitchBook, told The Verge that Brockman is “more of a product scale and commercial sort of guy” whose deep technical knowledge “will collapse certain decision-making layers.”
Translation: fewer approval steps, faster commercial decisions, and a clear tilt toward revenue as the IPO nears. OpenAI is chasing products that separate it from rival Anthropic, and it’s putting a builder in charge of that effort.
There’s a money angle too. Ross Carmel, a partner at Sichenzia Ross Ference Carmel, told The Verge that centralizing power lets OpenAI cut some of its priciest salaries. “When you’re going into an IPO, particularly for a company like OpenAI, who is lagging behind Anthropic in terms of revenue, you want to decrease those expenses,” he said.
The part experts are watching
Executives leaving before a public listing isn’t unusual. What is unusual, Carmel said, is the timing. “The fact they’re all in this small time period, that part is unusual.” Analysts told The Verge the exits were more intense than normal and could raise red flags.
There’s also a downstream effect on staff. Rolfes put it bluntly: “Whatever he says goes now.” A lead researcher who disagrees with Brockman’s approach may simply walk. So the consolidation at the top could ripple into more turnover below it.
Brockman himself waved off the concern. On CNBC’s “Squawk Box” this week, he said nothing was wrong, framing the churn as different leadership eras. “I’m a constant, Sam is a constant,” he said, arguing the company is stronger for that resilience.
What to expect next
Here’s how I read it. Brockman has been the engineering workhorse since OpenAI’s earliest days, and now he pairs that with commercial control at the exact moment the company needs to show investors a path to profit. Expect a heavier product cadence, tighter cost discipline, and a sharper push to out-ship Anthropic on features that drive revenue.
Keep an eye on two things: whether the executive exits slow down or keep coming, and how much OpenAI leans on Brockman as its public voice heading into the listing. If more press releases carry his name instead of Altman’s, you’ll know the shift is permanent.
For the full breakdown of who left and when, the original reporting is at The Verge AI.