A group of software engineers who say they were fired by their bosses because of AI are giving their former employers a taste of their own medicine.
With the powers of spite and friendship, they’ve built “OpenExecutive,” an AI system designed to do the work of a CEO, if not the entire c-suite, TechRadar reports.
“Work happens around the clock. Leadership doesn’t scale with it,” a demo video begins, as a stock music track called “Corporate Music Uplifting” plays in the background.
The team describes their AI system, perhaps with their tongues in their cheeks, as a “senior advisor with Harvard MBA-level knowledge.” Whether you believe that or not probably reflects how much stock you put in Harvard MBAs.
In any case, OpenExecutive is built using several of Anthropic’s Claude AI models, the default being Claude Sonnet 4.6, with Claude Opus 4.7 being reserved for “deep reasoning” tasks.
It recruits eight AI agents that each act as a different top level executive, including the chief strategy officer, chief financial officer, and the head of human resources. Together, they form a single unified “executive persona” — in effect, the CEO.
The developers say that the AI can learn from company documents and remembers its recommendations and decisions — which is more than what you can say for some CEOs who have a conveniently selective memory. If you’re skeptical, you can poke around in the system yourself, since it’s open-source.
Is OpenExecutive actually going to outmode the CEO? Probably not, since, whatever your opinions on them, there’s a lot to being the head of a company that a machine can’t emulate, like taking accountability (okay, bad example). But that’s the thing: you could argue the same thing for their employees, with the notable difference that the rank and file are the ones doing almost all the labor.
And so, going by CEOs’ own specious logic, now that a tool exists that can do their job more efficiently than they can— coming with none of inconveniences that human workers bring, like going on strike or asking for a raise — then they should be okay with being replaced.
Of course, some AI-obsessed bigwigs may see tools like this a boon. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is reportedly building a CEO AI agent to help him do his job. He’s also building a photorealistic AI clone of himself so he can be virtually omnipresent throughout the company. Or maybe that’s the lie being fed to him by his underlings building the AI CEOs, so that he’ll be usurped by thinking machines once they become powerful enough.
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