Former Harvard president Larry Summers has resigned from the board of directors at OpenAI following revelations of a close association with disgraced financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, Breitbart reported. Summers, who served as former President Bill Clinton's Secretary of the Treasury, said he was "deeply ashamed" after Epstein's emails proved their friendship.
Summers had announced his resignation from the artificial intelligence tech company after originally sharing that he was stepping back from his public-facing commitments. "Larry has decided to resign from the OpenAI Board of Directors, and we respect his decision," the company said in a statement.
"We appreciate his many contributions and the perspective he brought to the Board," OpenAI added. Conservative commentator Steve Guest shared an image of the correspondence in which Summers "emailed Jeffrey Epstein about getting advice about women," he captioned his post to X on Nov. 13.
Larry Summers, who was Bill Clinton's Treasury secretary and director of the National Economic Council under Barack Obama and is currently on the board of OpenAI & Skillsoft, emailed Jeffrey Epstein about getting advice about women.
"….hit on a few women 10 years ago and… pic.twitter.com/9IGF4UUayI
— Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) November 13, 2025
Summers ducked out of the company, which called his move "in line" with what he had already announced. "I am grateful for the opportunity to have served, excited about the potential of the company, and look forward to following their progress," Summers said.
He had joined OpenAI's board in November 2023, just as it was going through growing pains under its CEO, Sam Altman, who was ousted at the time and has since been reinstated. In fact, it was Summers, in his position as a board member, who reviewed the firing that was ultimately overturned.
OpenAI wasn't the only board on which Summers was featured prominently before stepping down. He also served as a paid contributor to Bloomberg TV and was a contract writer for the New York Times' opinion section, though the Gray Lady has cancelled that arrangement.
Summers served on the Budget Lab at Yale and as the chairman of the Center for Global Development's board. He was also recently released from his teaching job at Harvard University, where he had once served as president, Fox News reported.
A video captured by students in Summers' economics class, featuring his lament about his ties to Epstein, went viral. The Ivy League school's spokesperson wouldn't comment except to say that 'his co-teachers will complete the remaining three class sessions of the courses he has been teaching with them this semester, and he is not scheduled to teach next semester."
According to CNN, Epstein's emails show his reach included celebrities, high-profile businesspeople, government officials, and others. While the mainstream media has been attempting to make a big deal about his tangential connection to President Donald Trump, it's clear that Epstein was a contact point for hundreds of prominent people.
"CNN’s analysis of about 2,200 email threads found that at least 740 were exchanges between Epstein and prominent figures in academia, government, media, and business. Epstein’s correspondence with them, which also included numerous text messages, spanned a decade from 2009 to the day before his July 2019 arrest," CNN reported.
This was even after Epstein had been convicted of soliciting prostitution with a minor and had been a registered sex offender since 2008. More resignations are sure to follow after the president signed legislation demanding that the Justice Department release all files on Epstein, The Hill reported.
Attorney General Pam Bondi has been ordered to release the information in the next 30 days after the resolution passed with near unanimous support. It allows for Bondi to hold back records "would jeopardize an active federal investigation or ongoing prosecution."
The Epstein files are sure to contain information that will ruin many lives once they're made public. The emails have already caused Summers to step away from every place of honor, and there will likely be many others like him in the months to come.
