Mira Murati and two research leaders quit OpenAI on the same day

Mira Murati, OpenAI’s chief technology officer, announced she was leaving the company after six and a half years, saying she wanted “to create the time and space to do my own exploration.” Later the same day, chief executive Sam Altman said two more senior research figures were also departing: chief research officer Bob McGrew and vice-president of research Barret Zoph. Altman said the three had “made these decisions independently of each other and amicably,” and that Murati’s timing made sense as an opportunity to hand over to “the next generation of leadership” all at once.

Murati had joined OpenAI in 2018 and risen to CTO in 2022, a period spanning the development of GPT-3, ChatGPT and GPT-4, and had briefly served as interim chief executive during the November 2023 board crisis that removed and then reinstated Altman. McGrew and Zoph were senior research leaders whose departures, alongside Murati’s, left OpenAI’s research and technical leadership substantially reconstituted within a single day.

The timing drew scrutiny because it landed in the same week Reuters reported that OpenAI was preparing to convert its core business into a for-profit structure, removing the non-profit board’s controlling role and granting Altman equity for the first time. The departures added to a run of senior exits from OpenAI’s research and safety functions over the preceding year, including co-founder Ilya Sutskever and researchers focused on alignment work, and were widely read as evidence of an internal shift away from the research-lab culture the departing leaders had helped build. Murati went on to found Thinking Machines Lab in 2025.