Five months after returning to OpenAI, Barrett Zoff – the company’s head of enterprise AI sales – has departed, The Verge Have you learnt.
Zoff returned to OpenAI in mid-January after a stint as co-founder and CTO of Thinking Machines Lab, a competing AI company founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati. Shortly after Zoff returned to OpenAI, the company said he would contribute to the venture — a significant role at OpenAI, as in recent months it had vowed to stop pursuing so-called “side quests” and focus on key revenue drivers like enterprise and coding ahead of its planned IPO.
OpenAI confirmed this The Verge He will depart Zoff. He posted a goodbye message in the company’s Slack channels. Zoff did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Zoff originally left OpenAI in late 2024 for Murati’s Thinking Machines Lab, but abruptly left the role in January 2026 after reports of alleged misconduct involving an undisclosed affair with a colleague. Muratti posted on X in January that Thinking Machines Lab had “parted ways” with Zoff and 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 when he was ousted in November 2023, and during the recent OpenAI trial, Murati testified that she could not trust everything Altman said. In September 2024, when Muratti left OpenAI to start the Thinking Machines Lab, a group of OpenAI employees followed him shortly afterwards. But the three of them – including Zoff – all returned to OpenAI together last January. OpenAI’s Applications CEO Fidzi Simo wrote on
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