OpenAI board member Larry Summers steps down amid Epstein file revelations

Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers has resigned from OpenAI’s board just days after Congress released an extensive collection of emails connected to Jeffrey Epstein, revealing personal and intimate exchanges.

Summers, who also previously served as Harvard University’s president and is currently a professor there, is now facing further scrutiny. According to The Harvard Crimson, the university will conduct its own investigation into Summers’s communications and association with Epstein. The report also notes that Summers plans to withdraw from several public-facing commitments during this period.

His decision to leave the OpenAI board came shortly after both the House and Senate voted to release the Epstein files publicly. In recent days, a House committee published years of email exchanges between Epstein and Summers. Among them was a message in which Summers sought Epstein’s advice on a romantic pursuit involving a woman he described as his mentee.

The emails, spanning November 2018 to July 2019, show Summers acknowledging the power imbalance between himself and the woman he was mentoring.

“She must be very confused or maybe wants to cut me off but wants professional connection a lot and so holds to it,” Summers wrote in a March 2019 email.

Epstein, who referred to himself earlier as Summers’s “wing man,” responded in June 2019 with, “She is doomed to be with you.”

In later exchanges, Summers suggested that his “best shot” at persuading the woman to sleep with him stemmed from her finding him “invaluable and interesting,” adding that “she can’t have it without romance/sex.” In June, Epstein repeatedly advised him to play the “long game” and keep her in what he described as a “forced holding pattern.”

Epstein was arrested the following month, in July 2019, on charges of sex trafficking of minors and conspiracy related to sex trafficking.