OpenAI's exec exodus hits a dozen — right before the IPO

Denise Dresser lasted eight months. OpenAI's Chief Revenue Officer — hired out of Slack in December — is out as of August 13, and the company already has Dali Rajic, former president and COO of the security firm Wiz, lined up to replace her. That's two CROs in under a year. Two days earlier, Brad Lightcap, the COO who'd spent eight years there running finance and then operations, told staff he was leaving to start something new.

The safety side emptied out first. Johannes Heidecke (head of Safety Systems), Chloé Bakalar (the company's only dedicated AI ethicist, less than a year in the role, not backfilled) and Josh Achiam (former head of Mission Alignment, nine years in) all left in July during a reorg that folded safety into research. The Mission Alignment team itself was disbanded back in February. Tally it up and roughly a dozen senior people have resigned in the space of a few months.

The timing is the tell. All of this is landing while OpenAI preps a Wall Street debut. Revenue-chief churn before an IPO reads as sales pressure and a board that wants harder numbers. Safety and ethics leadership walking out — and their seats staying empty — reads as something else entirely.

Why it matters: the people paid to slow OpenAI down are leaving faster than the people paid to speed it up.