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Barret Zoph is out at OpenAI again after just five months

He rejoined the company in January after a stint as co-founder of Mira Murati’s competitor, Thinking Machines Lab.

by Hayden FieldJun 19, 2026, 4:49 AM UTC

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** Image: The Verge

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Barret Zoph is out at OpenAI again after just five months

He rejoined the company in January after a stint as co-founder of Mira Murati’s competitor, Thinking Machines Lab.

by Hayden FieldJun 19, 2026, 4:49 AM UTC

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*]($1)Hayden Field is The Verge’s senior AI reporter. An AI beat reporter for more than five years, her work has also appeared in CNBC, MIT Technology Review, Wired UK, and other outlets.Five months after returning to OpenAI, Barret Zoph — the company’s head of enterprise AI sales — has departed, The Verge has learned.

Zoph returned to OpenAI in mid-January after a stint as co-founder and CTO of Thinking Machines Lab, the competing AI company founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati. Shortly after Zoph returned to OpenAI, the company said he would lead its push into enterprise — a significant role at OpenAI, since in recent months it had vowed to stop chasing so-called “side quests” and focus on key revenue drivers like enterprise and coding ahead of its planned IPO.

OpenAI confirmed to The Verge that Zoph will be departing. He posted a goodbye message in the company’s Slack channels. Zoph did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Are you a current or former OpenAI employee? Contact me via Signal at haydenfield.11 on a non-work device with tips.

Zoph originally left OpenAI in the fall of 2024 for Murati’s Thinking Machines Lab, but departed the role abruptly in January 2026 after reports of alleged misconduct involving an undisclosed relationship with a colleague. Murati posted on X in January that Thinking Machines Lab had “parted ways” with Zoph and that he would be replaced as CTO.

Thinking Machines Lab has its own tensions with OpenAI. Murati briefly took over as CEO from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman during his November 2023 ouster, and during the recent OpenAI trial, Murati testified that she couldn’t trust everything Altman said. In September 2024, when Murati left OpenAI to start Thinking Machines Lab, a group of OpenAI employees followed shortly after. But three of them — including Zoph — all returned to OpenAI together this past January. Fidji Simo, OpenAI’s CEO of Applications, wrote on X at the time that she was “excited to welcome Barret Zoph, Luke Metz, and Sam Schoenholz back” and that the decision had “been in the works for several weeks.”

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