OpenAI’s Fidji Simo takes medical leave amid executive shake-up

OpenAI announced a A major reorganization takes place on Friday as Fidji Simo, CEO of the company publishing AGI, takes medical leave to focus on her health. OpenAI President Greg Brockman will handle the product teams in Simo’s absence. Simo’s previous job title was CEO of Applications.

Brad Lightcap, chief operating officer, and senior executive vice president, Sam Altman, are moving into a Special Projects role. Kate Roche, marketing director, is taking time off to focus on her health. Roche is undergoing treatment for breast cancer. When she returns, she will have a “different, narrower role,” according to a note Simo shared with OpenAI employees and seen by WIRED.

“As I mentioned when I joined, I had a relapse of my neuroimmune condition a few weeks before starting work,” Simo said in the note sent in OpenAI’s “core” Slack channel. “It’s been a bit up and down since then, and last month has been particularly rough health-wise. The whole time I’ve been here, I’ve been putting off medical tests and new treatments to stay completely focused on the job and not miss a single day of work. I took time off for the first time two weeks before the break to get some medical tests done, and it’s clear now that I’ve gone a bit overboard and really need to try new interventions to stabilize my health.”

Simo is expected to take “several weeks off” according to her internal position.

In his new role, Lightcap will be responsible for the company’s future deployed engineers, who integrate within enterprise organizations and help integrate OpenAI technology, among other duties.

OpenAI will begin a search for a new marketing director, Simo said. The company is also looking for a chief communications officer to replace Hannah Wong, who left her position in January. Chris Lehane has taken over as Communications Team Leader in the meantime.

“We have a strong leadership team focused on our biggest priorities: advancing groundbreaking research, growing our global user base of nearly a billion users, and advancing enterprise use cases,” an OpenAI spokesperson said in a statement. “We are well positioned to continue executing with continuity and momentum.”

Simo joined OpenAI in August 2025, where she has led several of the company’s consumer-facing products, including ChatGPT, Codex, and the social video app Sora. It recently shut down Sora and told employees that the company needed to cut back on side projects and refocus on its core products.

This decision comes as OpenAI eyes an initial public offering as soon as this year. The company recently raised $122 billion in the largest funding round the tech industry has ever seen, which valued the company at $852 billion.