Barret Zoph, OpenAI's head of enterprise AI sales, has left the company again - this time just five months after his return, The Verge has learned. It's the kind of revolving door that would make a subway turnstile jealous.
Zoph came back to OpenAI in mid-January after a brief stint as co-founder and CTO of Thinking Machines Lab, the rival AI startup founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati. Upon his return, OpenAI announced he would lead its enterprise push - a role of some importance given the company's recent vow to abandon "side quests" and focus on revenue drivers like enterprise and coding ahead of its planned IPO.
OpenAI confirmed Zoph's departure to The Verge. He posted a goodbye message in the company's Slack channels, presumably not using an emoji that sums up the situation. Zoph did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
This marks Zoph's third professional pivot in roughly a year. He originally left OpenAI in fall 2024 for Murati's Thinking Machines Lab, but departed abruptly in January 2026 after reports of alleged misconduct involving an undisclosed relationship with a colleague. Murati posted on X in January that Thinking Machines Lab had "parted ways" with Zoph and that he would be replaced as CTO.
Thinking Machines Lab has its own complicated history with OpenAI. Murati briefly served as CEO during Sam Altman's November 2023 ouster, and during the recent OpenAI trial, she testified that she couldn't trust everything Altman said. In September 2024, when Murati left OpenAI to start Thinking Machines Lab, a group of employees followed - but three of them, including Zoph, returned together this past January. Fidji Simo, OpenAI's CEO of Applications, wrote 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."
If you're a current or former OpenAI employee with tips, contact Hayden Field via Signal at haydenfield.11 on a non-work device.