OpenAI has lost more than a dozen executives since January, and the latest departure cuts unusually close to the company’s biggest strategic advantage. Chris Malone, who joined as head of data centers in March 2025, walked out the door last week. His exit matters because OpenAI’s lead over rivals like Anthropic rests heavily on its compute infrastructure. The company told TechCrunch the departure follows a reorganization that put vice president Sachin Katti in charge of infrastructure, meaning Malone no longer reported directly to president Greg Brockman. Demotions have a way of clearing out senior talent.
Brockman’s fingerprints are all over this restructuring. The co-founder stepped back from management duties when Sam Altman became CEO in 2019, and his subsequent years were, to put it mildly, complicated. Karen Hao’s book “Empire of AI” describes him seeding internal rivalries that contributed to the 2023 “Blip,” when the board briefly fired Altman. After a sabbatical in 2024, Brockman returned with renewed influence. Today, both infrastructure and product teams report to him. “I like to say that everyone reports to Greg at the end of the day,” Thibault Sottiaux, who leads OpenAI’s API and app divisions, told TechCrunch.
The IPO clock is ticking loudly in the background. OpenAI filed confidential disclosures with the SEC in June, but its public debut isn’t expected until 2027. That’s an unusually long runway — most companies that file confidentially hit the trading floor within five months. Rival Anthropic is reportedly profitable and also preparing to go public, while OpenAI’s losses reportedly continue growing alongside its revenue. Altman’s comments about a rough 12 months and the internal reorganization suggest the company filed for an IPO before it was structurally ready and is now scrambling to shed dead weight and boost revenue.
What we’re watching is a familiar tech startup pattern played in reverse. Companies usually bring in experienced operators to scale before an IPO — which explains the now-departed Fidji Simo and Kevin Weil, veterans of multiple tech businesses. Instead, OpenAI is turning back to its builder-in-chief. Brockman cut his teeth scaling Stripe’s business operations, and his renewed control over infrastructure and product suggests the board wants someone who knows how to make money without the overhead. Whether that’s enough to close the profitability gap with Anthropic before both companies start reporting quarterly earnings to public investors remains an open question. The executive vacuum is real, but for the first time in years, so is the clarity about who’s filling it.
