OpenAI’s Fidji Simo is taking medical leave amid an executive shakeup

OpenAI announced a major reorganization Friday as the company’s CEO of AGI Deployment, Fiji Simotakes medical leave to focus on her health. OpenAI President Greg Brockman will manage the product teams in Simo’s absence. Simo’s previous title was CEO of Applications.

Brad Lightcap, the COO and one of CEO Sam Altman top MPs, move into a “special projects” role. Kate Rouch, the head of marketing, is taking a leave of absence to focus on her health. Rouch is undergoing treatment for breast cancer. When she returns, it will be in a “different, narrower scope role,” according to a note Simo shared with OpenAI staff seen by WIRED.

“As I shared when I joined, I had a relapse of my neuroimmune condition a few weeks before the work started,” Simo said in the note sent in OpenAI’s “core” Slack channel. “It’s been a bit of a rollercoaster since then, and the last month has been particularly rough health-wise. For my entire time here, I’ve been putting off medical tests and new therapies to stay completely focused on work and not miss a single day of work. I took time off for the first time two weeks before the break for some medical tests, and it’s really clear now that I need to step in and stabilize a little too far.”

Simo is expected to take “several weeks” off, according to his internal post.

In his new role, Lightcap will be in charge of the company’s forward-deployed engineers, which include being embedded in enterprise organizations and helping to integrate OpenAI’s technology.

OpenAI will start looking for a new CMO, Simo said. The company is also looking for a chief communications officer to replace Hannah Wong, who left her post in January. Chris Lehane has meanwhile taken over as the leader of the communications team.

“We have a strong leadership team focused on our biggest priorities: advancing frontier research, expanding our global user base of nearly 1 billion users, and empowering enterprise use cases,” an OpenAI spokesperson said in a statement. “We are well positioned to continue with continuity and momentum.”

Simo joined OpenAI in August 2025, where she took over many of the company’s consumer-facing products, including ChatGPT, Codex, and social video app Sora. She recently closed the Sora app and told staff that the company needed to cut side projects and refocus on its core products.

The decision comes as OpenAI eyes an IPO as soon as this year. The company recently raised $122 billion in the largest funding round the tech industry has ever seen, valuing the company at $852 billion.