Barret Zoph, OpenAI’s head of enterprise AI sales, has left the company after just five months, The Verge reported on June 19. It is his second departure from OpenAI in roughly six months.
The Timeline
Zoph originally left OpenAI in fall 2024 to cofound Thinking Machines Lab alongside former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati. He served as the startup’s CTO until January 2026, when Thinking Machines parted ways with him following what leaders at the lab described as “serious misconduct,” according to WIRED. WIRED reported that the misconduct involved an alleged undisclosed relationship with another employee.
Zoph returned to OpenAI in mid-January, along with fellow Thinking Machines cofounders Luke Metz and Sam Schoenholz. Fidji Simo, OpenAI’s CEO of Applications, posted on X that the hiring “had been in the works for several weeks” and that she did not share Thinking Machines’ concerns over Zoph’s ethics, according to The Verge.
OpenAI assigned Zoph to lead its enterprise push, a role The Verge described as significant given the company’s stated plan to stop chasing “side quests” and focus on enterprise and coding revenue ahead of its planned IPO.
Five months later, he posted a goodbye message in OpenAI’s internal Slack channels. OpenAI confirmed the departure to The Verge. Zoph did not respond to a request for comment.
Enterprise Leadership Turnover
The departure adds to a pattern of senior researcher and executive movement across frontier labs in June 2026. Noam Shazeer, VP of Engineering at Google DeepMind and co-lead of Gemini, announced his departure to join OpenAI on June 18. Dean Ball, an AI policy scholar, was hired the same day to lead OpenAI’s new Strategic Futures team.
For OpenAI, the enterprise sales lead role is now open at a critical moment. The company has been positioning enterprise revenue as a key growth driver for its confidential IPO filing, and competitors including Anthropic, Google, and Microsoft are aggressively pursuing the same enterprise AI budgets.