Ex Treasury boss Summers resigns from OpenAI after named in Epstein files

Former United States Treasury Secretary Larry Summers has resigned from the OpenAI board, days after US President Donald Trump ordered the Justice Department to investigate his and other prominent Democrats ‘ ties to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

The outlet Axios first reported the resignation on Wednesday.

“Larry has decided to resign from the OpenAI Board of Directors, and we respect his decision. We appreciate his many contributions and the perspective he brought to the Board”, OpenAI ‘ s board of directors said in a statement.

The move comes one day after the Republican-controlled US Congress voted almost unanimously to force the release of Department of Justice files on Epstein, an outcome Trump had fought for months before ending his opposition.

He has served on the OpenAI board since late 2023, following the brief removal of the ChatGPT maker’s CEO, Sam Altman.

Other prominent companies with ties to Summers include edu-tech firm Skillsoft, where he has been a board member since 2021, and Santander, where he chairs the bank’s international advisory board. He was also a former president of Harvard University.

The resignation comes after Summers announced that he would step back from all other public commitments to “rebuild trust and repair relationships with the people closest to me”.

“Everyone in Washington has known who Larry Summers is for decades. This was always hiding in plain sight. He had to step down as president of Harvard in 2006 for similar issues. I’m glad we are finally able to turn the page on Larry Summers”, Lindsay Owens, executive director of Groundwork Collaborative, said in a statement provided to Al Jazeera.

Summers is still a professor at the university, but the institution is set to open a probe into Summers’s connections with Epstein, the university’s newspaper reported on Tuesday.

The Epstein scandal has been a political thorn in Trump’s side for months, partly because he amplified conspiracy theories about Epstein to his own supporters. One of the causes of his approval ratings’ decline, which dropped to a new low of 38 percent in Reuters/Ipsos polling this week, was the files’ non-releaseability. Only 20% of Americans approve of Trump’s approach to the problem.

Many Trump supporters think his administration has tampered with information about Epstein’s death in a Manhattan jail in 2019 and tampered with his connections to powerful people.