Harvard University, where Summers is a professor, also plans to launch an investigation into the allegations against him.
Published November 19, 2025
Former US 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 news outlet Axios first reported his resignation on Wednesday.
Recommended stories
list of 4 itemsend of list
“Larry has decided to step down from the OpenAI Board of Directors, and we respect his decision. We appreciate his many contributions and the perspective he brings to the Board,” OpenAI’s board said in a statement.
The move came a day after the Republican-controlled U.S. Congress voted almost unanimously to force the release of Justice Department files on Epstein, an outcome President Trump fought for months before ending his opposition.
He has been on OpenAI’s board since late 2023, following the brief firing of the ChatGPT maker’s CEO Sam Altman.
Other notable companies with ties to Summers include education technology company Skillsoft, where he has been a director since 2021, and Santander, where he chairs the bank’s international advisory board. He is also a former president of Harvard University.
The resignation comes after Summers announced he was stepping back from other commitments to “rebuild trust and repair relationships with those closest to him.”
“Everyone in Washington has known for decades who Larry Summers is. This has always been hidden in plain sight. He had to resign as president of Harvard University in 2006 over similar issues. We are happy to finally turn the page on Larry Summers,” Lindsay Owens, executive director of the Groundwork Collaborative, said in a statement to Al Jazeera.
Summers remains a professor at the university, but the university plans to launch an investigation into his ties to Epstein, the university’s newspaper reported on Tuesday.
The Epstein scandal has been a political thorn in Trump’s side in recent months, in part because Trump has spread conspiracy theories about Epstein to his own supporters. The failure to release the files has been cited as one of the reasons for his declining approval ratings, which dropped to an all-time low of 38% in a Reuters/Ipsos poll this week. Only 20% of Americans approve of how President Trump has handled this issue.
Many Trump supporters believe the Trump administration covered up Epstein’s relationships with powerful people and obscured details about his death in a Manhattan jail in 2019, which was ruled a suicide.
Summers, a Democrat, served as Treasury secretary for former U.S. President Bill Clinton and as director of the National Economic Council for former President Barack Obama.
