{"slug": "barret-zoph-is-out-at-openai-again-after-just-five-months", "title": "Barret Zoph is out at OpenAI again after just five months", "summary": "Barret Zoph, OpenAI's head of enterprise AI sales, has left the company just five months after returning. He rejoined in January after a brief stint at Thinking Machines Lab, a competitor founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati. OpenAI confirmed his departure.", "body_md": "Five months after returning to OpenAI, Barret Zoph — the company’s head of enterprise AI sales — has departed, *The Verge* has learned.\n\n# Barret Zoph is out at OpenAI again after just five months\n\nHe rejoined the company in January after a stint as co-founder of Mira Murati’s competitor, Thinking Machines Lab.\n\n# Barret Zoph is out at OpenAI again after just five months\n\nHe rejoined the company in January after a stint as co-founder of Mira Murati’s competitor, Thinking Machines Lab.\n\nZoph 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](/ai-artificial-intelligence/908513/the-vibes-are-off-at-openai) so-called “side quests” and focus on key revenue drivers like enterprise and coding ahead of its planned IPO.\n\nOpenAI 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.\n\n```\nAre you a current or former OpenAI employee? Contact me via Signal at haydenfield.11 on a non-work device with tips.\n```\n\nZoph 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](https://www.wired.com/story/thinking-machines-lab-cofounder-office-relationship-firing-openai/) involving an undisclosed relationship with a colleague. Murati [posted](https://x.com/miramurati/status/2011577319295692801?s=20) on X in January that Thinking Machines Lab had “parted ways” with Zoph and that he would be replaced as CTO.\n\nThinking 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](/ai-artificial-intelligence/926383/mira-murati-sam-altman-musk-trial-ouster) 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](https://x.com/fidjissimo/status/2011592010881446116?s=20) 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.”\n\n**Follow topics and authors** from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.\n\n## Most Popular\n\n- Midjourney goes from generating cat images to full-body ultrasound scans\n- Apple’s weird anti-nausea dots cured my car sickness\n- Tim Cook says RAM expenses are ‘unsustainable’ and Apple is going to raise prices\n- This Ghost in the Shell keyboard makes me want to activate the hundred spidery robot fingers inside my regular fingers\n- Amazon employees say they’re facing termination for backing data center limits", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/barret-zoph-is-out-at-openai-again-after-just-five-months", "canonical_source": "https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/952837/barret-zoph-openai-thinking-machines-lab", "published_at": "2026-06-19 04:49:33+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-06-19 04:59:48.241100+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "ai-startups", "ai-products"], "entities": ["Barret Zoph", "OpenAI", "Thinking Machines Lab", "Mira Murati", "Sam Altman", "Fidji Simo", "Luke Metz", "Sam Schoenholz"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/barret-zoph-is-out-at-openai-again-after-just-five-months", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/barret-zoph-is-out-at-openai-again-after-just-five-months.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/barret-zoph-is-out-at-openai-again-after-just-five-months.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/barret-zoph-is-out-at-openai-again-after-just-five-months.jsonld"}}