{"id":147245,"date":"2026-07-10T17:27:08","date_gmt":"2026-07-10T17:27:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/147245\/"},"modified":"2026-07-10T17:27:08","modified_gmt":"2026-07-10T17:27:08","slug":"fidji-simo-steps-back-from-openai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/147245\/","title":{"rendered":"Fidji Simo steps back from OpenAI"},"content":{"rendered":"

Three months ago, Fidji Simo announced she would take medical leave<\/a> from OpenAI. She was the company\u2019s \u201cCEO, AGI deployment,\u201d a demanding job that involved overseeing more than half of OpenAI\u2019s workforce and running nearly every aspect of the business of AI while CEO Sam Altman handled research and compute. But she\u2019d also been struggling with the chronic neuroimmune condition POTS and experienced a relapse before starting the job of a lifetime last year.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s now clear that I\u2019ve pushed a little too far and I really need to try new interventions to stabilize my health,\u201d she told employees in April. \u201cI can\u2019t wait to be back in the arena with you all soon.\u201d <\/p>\n

Sadly, it didn\u2019t work out that way. Simo announced last night<\/a> that she won\u2019t return to her full-time role at OpenAI and will instead become a part-time advisor. During her medical leave, \u201cit became clear that the road to recovery would be much longer and more complex than I had anticipated\u2014and that I needed to focus on it fully,\u201d she wrote on X.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a huge loss for OpenAI. Simo had become one of the most powerful women in the field, determining how AI would be integrated into every aspect of our lives, making decisions like the prioritization of OpenAI\u2019s forthcoming \u201csuperapp.\u201d (Even though she was on medical leave, we kept her at No. 28<\/a> on this year\u2019s Most Powerful Women list.) She was even overseeing other important execs like CFO Sarah Friar, freeing Altman up from management duties. After OpenAI\u2019s IPO, Simo would have been a key executive at the public company.<\/p>\n

So this turn of events, to me, reveals just how tenuous women\u2019s grasp on power still is. It reminds me of two recent stories I\u2019ve been covering: Melinda French Gates\u2019 push into women\u2019s health<\/a> and the exit of Marianne Lake from JPMorgan\u2019s succession race<\/a>.<\/p>\n

French Gates has directed millions to women\u2019s health and, as a new addition, women\u2019s midlife health with this thesis: without their health, women can\u2019t access their full power. That\u2019s exactly what we\u2019re seeing play out here. Women are more likely to suffer from autoimmune diseases like POTS; Simo also has endometriosis<\/a>, a chronic women\u2019s health condition. Without adequate research and treatment for these conditions, women face additional barriers to leading in politics, business, and simply in their communities.<\/p>\n

French Gates\u2019 reason for tackling midlife health and menopause is that women are experiencing poor health at the exact same time they should be at the very peak of their careers. When I spoke with the billionaire philanthropist in May, it was shortly after Simo had gone on leave and Kate Rousch had stepped down as OpenAI\u2019s CMO<\/a> after a battle with breast cancer, so I asked her what she thought. \u201cWe need women in all of these roles in society, whether it\u2019s in state legislatures, whether it\u2019s in technology companies, we need women changing society,\u201d she told me. \u201cWhen you see that, and it\u2019s, \u2018Oh, finally, we have more women at the top of technology.\u2019 And then we just lost two\u2014it\u2019s just tragic to think of.’\u201d<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, when Lake left JPMorgan and was no longer a contender to take over as CEO after Jamie Dimon, I talked with experts about what that meant for the pipeline of women to top leadership roles. Korn Ferry\u2019s Jane Stevenson explained it<\/a> this way: without more women in the running for these positions, each individual loss hits harder. \u201cIt\u2019s not different than what happens to men every day, but it has a much higher cost because there aren\u2019t as many women in situations to be the counterpoint,\u201d Stevenson said of JPMorgan.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s what we\u2019re seeing here, too. OpenAI has other important women execs, like Friar and chief revenue officer Denise Dresser. But it\u2019s still rare in AI or even tech for a female exec to have the scope, influence, and impact that Simo did. Much of her role is being split<\/a> between president Greg Brockman and chief strategy officer Jason Kwon, with Friar taking up some responsibilities (she\u2019s busy preparing for that IPO). In AI, there\u2019s Daniela Amodei who has a similar role to Simo\u2019s at Anthropic; Mira Murati building her own AI company in Thinking Machines Lab; and female finance execs across major tech companies<\/a> making spending decisions about the capital-intensive future of AI. But the numbers are slim.<\/p>\n

Each individual female exec is important enough to impact the future of a major technological transformation. At OpenAI, for example, Simo shepherded ChatGPT Health, which offered a more secure chatbot experience for sensitive medical questions. No doubt, Simo\u2019s own health experiences influenced her prioritization of that work. <\/p>\n

Simo said yesterday that none other than Mark Zuckerberg urged her to take a year off to stabilize her health when it first began to decline while she was at Facebook. He told her to play the \u201clong game.\u201d \u201cI didn\u2019t even pause to consider it,\u201d she said yesterday. <\/p>\n

\u201cI wish I had listened,\u201d she says now. But when these opportunities for women are still so rare, it\u2019s no surprise a top rising exec would be reluctant to step away for that long. (A man, less likely to experience these health challenges in the first place, might also have more confidence the perfect job would be waiting for him when he got back.) \u201cI grew up believing that opportunities were precious and that when they appeared, you grabbed them with both hands,\u201d reflected Simo, who grew up in a small town in southern France and became one of the most powerful execs in technology. She was right\u2014but if the world were built to keep women in power, she would have had the support to stay there.<\/p>\n

Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com<\/a><\/p>\n

The Most Powerful Women Daily newsletter is Fortune\u2019s daily briefing for and about the women leading the business world. Subscribe here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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\u2014 Wally Funk, when she set a record as the oldest person to travel to space in 2021. She died Wednesday<\/a> at 87.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Three months ago, Fidji Simo announced she would take medical leave from OpenAI. She was the company\u2019s \u201cCEO,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":147246,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[150],"tags":[1847,7963,7964,770,613,581],"class_list":["post-147245","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sam-altman","tag-career","tag-most-powerful-women","tag-mpw-daily","tag-no-copyright","tag-openai","tag-sam-altman"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@people\/116896861267809983","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147245","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=147245"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147245\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/147246"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=147245"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=147245"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=147245"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}