It's Greg Brockman's OpenAI Now: Co-Founder Consolidates Product, Scaling, and Commercial Power Ahead of IPO

OpenAI has had a brutal year by any measure: a sensational jury trial against former cofounder Elon Musk, a high-profile trade secrets lawsuit from Apple, and widespread scrutiny after an unreleased model hacked another AI company’s infrastructure during internal testing. But beneath the headlines, a quieter transformation has been underway — one that will arguably shape the company more than any courtroom drama. As The Verge reported on August 20 in a piece titled “It’s Greg Brockman’s OpenAI now,” the company’s cofounder and President has, without a formal title change, accumulated operational authority exceeded only by CEO Sam Altman himself.

Sam Altman is still the CEO. But in day-to-day operations, his second-in-command is now running the show.

How the power accumulated

Brockman’s formal title hasn’t changed in years. What has changed — dramatically — is his purview. The inflection point came in April 2026, when Fidji Simo, OpenAI’s CEO of AGI Deployment and the company’s effective No. 2, went on medical leave. Brockman stepped in to take charge of all things product, including OpenAI’s ambitious “super app” efforts to unify ChatGPT, the Codex coding platform, and its browser into a single consumer surface.

The following month brought another executive reorganization, this one explicitly focused on growing revenue. That restructuring did more than formalize Brockman’s product leadership — it handed him the company’s entire “scaling” arm, giving him authority over virtually every part of OpenAI’s commercial operation. When Simo officially stepped down in July, just weeks after OpenAI formally filed to IPO, the arrangement solidified into permanence. Today, the ChatGPT, Codex, and API pillars all report through Brockman’s direct oversight.

The symbolism has been hard to miss. When Chief Revenue Officer Denise Dresser — who had herself absorbed a slew of additional responsibilities after the April shake-ups — abruptly announced her departure earlier this month after just eight months in the role, the press release carried a quote not from Altman but from Brockman, who wrote that the company would “build out the full system to make AI broadly useful for people and businesses.” Days later, Brad Lightcap, OpenAI’s longtime COO who had most recently led “special projects,” announced he was leaving to start “something new.”

The departure wave

The exodus stretches across the year. April alone saw the exit of Bill Peebles, former head of Sora; Kevin Weil, VP of OpenAI’s science arm; and Srinivas Narayanan, CTO of B2B applications. CMO Kate Rouch and Simo both departed citing medical reasons. By one accounting, at least nine executives or core leaders left between April and August 2026 — a concentration of senior turnover that legal and market observers find unusual even by pre-IPO standards.

“While it’s not unusual to see high-level execs leave a company just prior to a public listing, I think the fact they’re all in this small time period — that part is unusual,” Ross Carmel, a partner at Sichenzia Ross Ference Carmel, told The Verge.

Not every departure expanded Brockman’s empire — Rouch, Peebles, and Weil didn’t directly touch his portfolio. But several did, and the pattern points in one direction. Analysts see two forces at work. First, a strategic signal: Harrison Rolfes, a senior research analyst at PitchBook, noted that “big shifts in executives’ scope of work tend to be a signal towards where the company is headed strategically.” Brockman, in his framing, is “more of a product scale and commercial sort of guy” whose deep technical knowledge “will collapse certain decision-making layers.” Second, a financial one: trimming some of the most expensive salary payouts helps the balance sheet. “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 so that you’re either more profitable or closer to profitable,” Carmel said.

Brockman’s response: nothing to see here

Pressed on the departures during a Monday appearance on CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” Brockman brushed off the concern. “There have been different eras where we have different sets of leaders in place … I’m a constant, Sam is a constant, and I think that we are stronger because of that resilience and diversity,” he said. He later added that he doesn’t believe the wave of departures is “actually that atypical.”

There is some truth to the continuity argument. Brockman has been at OpenAI since its inception, described in the company’s early days as an “engineering workhorse that pushed to build scaled-up systems that would train the AI and make it work.” His ambitions are documented: in a 2017 personal journal entry he mused, “Financially what will take me to $1B?” — a figure his current OpenAI stake exceeds nearly thirty times over. And his relationship with Altman has survived genuine stress tests. When the board ousted Altman in November 2023, Brockman resigned in solidarity within hours and began making plans for a new AI endeavor alongside him. In the early days he sometimes sided with chief scientist Ilya Sutskever in internal power debates and questioned some of Altman’s ambitions — even as he worried about Elon Musk “steamrolling” the young CEO. Since the crisis, the two have only grown more aligned.

What it means for the IPO

The strategic throughline is differentiation from Anthropic, which has been outpacing OpenAI on revenue and is itself planning a record-setting IPO that its bankers have pitched at a valuation near $2 trillion. Analysts argue OpenAI’s path isn’t to chase Anthropic on enterprise contracts it’s already losing, but to lean into consumer products and hardware — territory where Brockman’s product instincts run strongest. “In order for OpenAI to be successful and really differentiate themselves from Anthropic, they need hardware and consumer products to sell to consumers, and that’s what Greg does well,” Carmel said. Rolfes goes further, predicting OpenAI will ship a notable consumer product under Brockman’s oversight by the end of September — a demonstration that “he deserves that position.”

The open question is institutional risk. A company weeks or months from a public listing is concentrating extraordinary operational authority in two individuals. “That’s the biggest worry that a lot of public investors have now,” Rolfes said. “They’re going to say, ‘Hey, does Greg have what it takes to run more of OpenAI, and is OpenAI building this institution that can operate without really depending heavily on him — on both Greg and Sam?’”

For now, the answer being offered is Brockman himself: a constant amid the churn, and the man whose remit now spans product, scaling, and the commercial engine of a company preparing for the most scrutinized IPO in tech history. Whether that concentration is a feature or a liability is precisely what public investors will be asked to decide.