OpenAI puts Greg Brockman in charge

OpenAI has put co-founder Greg Brockman formally in charge of product as the company reorganizes teams around a combined ChatGPT, Codex and developer platform. The change was reported on May 16 by Wired and The Verge, which cited internal memos, and follows an earlier April leadership shuffle during Fidji Simo’s medical leave. OpenAI has not published a separate public blog post on the reorganization, but recent company product releases show ChatGPT and Codex moving closer together. The shift comes as OpenAI keeps expanding its applications business under a structure Sam Altman set out in 2025. ### How did Brockman’s role change? Greg Brockman was already OpenAI’s president, a role the company described in 2022 as combining company strategy with hands-on technical work. On May 16, Wired reported that OpenAI had now made Brockman the formal leader of product as part of a broader internal reshuffle. April 3 provided the first public sign of the interim arrangement. TechCrunch, citing a memo confirmed by an OpenAI spokesperson, reported that Fidji Simo would take medical leave for several weeks to manage a neuroimmune condition and that Brockman would manage product during her absence. ### Where does Fidji Simo fit in now? (openai.com) Sam Altman said on May 7, 2025 that Fidji Simo would join OpenAI as CEO of Applications, reporting directly to him, to lead the group responsible for how OpenAI’s research reaches users and customers. Altman said at the time that he would remain chief executive and continue to oversee Research, Compute and Applications. (techcrunch.com) September 2, 2025 showed how that structure had been built out. OpenAI said then that former Statsig chief executive Vijaye Raji would become CTO of Applications, reporting to Simo, and would head product engineering for ChatGPT and Codex. The Information reported on May 16 that Simo, identified there as OpenAI’s CEO of AGI Deployment, remains on medical leave as the company presses ahead with the product reorganization. (openai.com) TechCrunch had reported on April 3 that her leave was expected to last several weeks. ### What exactly is OpenAI combining? The Information reported on May 16 that OpenAI is combining the teams working on ChatGPT, Codex and its API into one organization. (openai.com) The Verge reported the same day that Brockman told staff the company would invest in “a single agentic platform” and merge ChatGPT and Codex into one unified experience. (theinformation.com) OpenAI’s own product releases point in the same direction. On May 14, the company announced that Codex was coming to the ChatGPT mobile app in preview, letting users monitor, steer and approve coding tasks from a phone while the work runs on connected machines. OpenAI said more than 4 million people use Codex every week. ### Why does the mobile Codex launch matter here? (theinformation.com) May 14 is the clearest public product example of the integration effort. OpenAI said the ChatGPT mobile app now shows live Codex threads, approvals, terminal output, test results and diffs from laptops, devboxes or remote environments. That release did not mention the internal reorganization, but it showed ChatGPT becoming the interface through which users can manage longer-running coding work. (openai.com) The company described the feature as part of a workflow in which agents take on more extended tasks and users check in from different devices. ### What has OpenAI said publicly about its broader applications push? (openai.com) Sam Altman said in May 2025 that OpenAI had become both a global product company serving hundreds of millions of users and an infrastructure company operating at large scale. He said Simo’s appointment was meant to strengthen execution as the company expanded those efforts. OpenAI’s news page shows the next public markers in that push. (openai.com) The company published “Work with Codex from anywhere” on May 14 and a separate ChatGPT product update on May 15, while the May 16 reorganization was reported through internal memos rather than a formal announcement. (openai.com 1) (openai.com 2)