THE FINDINGS
The titles changed.
So did the centers of authority.
The source deck captures many real leadership changes, but it mixes appointments, operating responsibilities, governance bodies, and estimates. The most consequential refinements are about who actually manages the work.
Product leadership needs updating.
OpenAI’s May reorganization changed consumer and enterprise leadership. Microsoft’s model/product split retained coordination through Suleyman. [10][38]
Role cards are grouped by function. Their position does not assert an individual reporting line. Arrows appear only for relationships explicitly supported by the cited source. “Reported” identifies journalistic sourcing; historical appointments and unresolved details are labeled.
PART I / THE MAJOR ORGANIZATIONS
Leadership, lab by lab.
Six organizations from the supplied deck, reconstructed using company announcements, filings, executive memos, and identified reporting.
Founder leadership · nonprofit control
OpenAI
Separate the Foundation’s control rights from the operating company’s research, product, and revenue leadership.
OpenAI Foundation controls OpenAI Group PBC through board-appointment rights. Bret Taylor chairs the Foundation. Zico Kolter serves on the Foundation board and observes the Group board without a vote; the two boards are not identical. [4][5]
Executive leadership
Research
Product and commercial
Security
Foundation directors: Bret Taylor, Sam Altman, Adam D’Angelo, Sue Desmond-Hellmann, Nicole Seligman, Paul Nakasone, Zico Kolter, Adebayo Ogunlesi, plus July appointees David Vélez and Robin Vince. The older structure page omits those two additions; the later appointment notice resolves that discrepancy. [4][5]
Fidji Simo stepped down from full-time leadership in July; Brad Lightcap announced his departure in August. Treat these as dated transitions, not evidence that every former direct report now reports to Brockman. [13][14]
Chen and Pachocki hold different research titles. “Dual research heads” is a useful shorthand, but the sources do not establish equal budgets or an exact division of every team. [7][8]
Executive president · Trust-appointed board majority
Anthropic
Dario sets research direction; Daniela manages the executive organization. The Trust appoints directors rather than running the lab.
Daniela Amodei chairs the board. Its April roster includes Dario Amodei, Yasmin Razavi, Jay Kreps, Reed Hastings, Chris Liddell, and Vas Narasimhan. With Narasimhan’s appointment, Trust-appointed directors became a board majority. [20]
Executive leadership
Research and compute
Engineering, products and Labs
Company functions
The company says Daniela manages the executive team. That does not independently establish the deck’s absolute claim that Dario has exactly one direct report. [17]
Do not list Jason Matheny or Paul Christiano as current trustees: they left in December 2023 and April 2024. Kanika Bahl and Zach Robinson left in January 2026. Cuéllar left the Trust for his executive role in August. Its older overview and later notices must be read together. [19][21]
Neil “Buddy” Shah is identified as Trust chair; Richard Fontaine and Ben Bernanke are identified in subsequent membership updates. A complete post-Cuéllar trustee roster is not established here. Neither the board nor the Trust belongs in the employee reporting hierarchy. [20][19]
AI business inside SpaceX
SpaceXAI / xAI
Parent-company executives, AI operating leadership, and Tesla collaborators are three different categories.
SpaceX acquired xAI on February 2, 2026. The June prospectus names Elon Musk, Gwynne Shotwell, and Bret Johnsen as executive officers and documents Musk’s voting control. The SpaceXAI branding followed in July. [25][26][29]
SpaceX corporate leadership
AI operations
Reporting describes Shotwell helping oversee AI operations and Johnsen taking on AI finance. Nicolls’s operating position should not be confused with the parent’s CEO role. The prospectus does not provide an AI researcher-by-researcher chart. [28][26]
The departure of the non-Musk founding team is widely reported. This is a historical talent-flow event, not a current leadership roster. The report avoids recreating obsolete product-team ownership after those departures. [30]
The deck’s Brian Bjelde, Jared Birchall, Ashok Elluswamy, and Anno van den Akker entries do not establish a single employee hierarchy. Their exact current AI-unit authority and reporting lines are held out of the confirmed map. Shared leadership or collaboration does not make Tesla a SpaceX subsidiary. [26][28]
Operating leadership · science chair
Google DeepMind
The August memo separates operating and scientific leadership.
The August 5 memo assigns Kavukcuoglu the operating remit, reporting to Pichai. Hassabis retains Isomorphic Labs alongside his new scientific role. [31]
Parent and scientific leadership
Research · products · infrastructure
Meta Superintelligence Labs
A functional leadership map is more defensible than treating a leaked four-pillar chart as a complete current HR hierarchy.
MSL sits within Meta. Public reporting identifies Alexandr Wang and Nat Friedman as its leading executives. Meta’s investor transcript describes research, product, and infrastructure functions, with FAIR’s longer-term research distinguished within that structure. [34][33]
Parent and MSL leadership
Research
The deck’s “four pillars” can be reconciled with Meta’s three functional areas by separating frontier-model research and FAIR. Do not infer four equally independent divisions, current team sizes, or 30 current direct reports from a January chart. [33][34]
Muse Spark launched on April 8, 2026. July brought the 1.1 update and expanded product capabilities. The original deck confused the initial model launch with a subsequent release. [35][36]
LeCun’s AMI role belongs in the independent-lab section. The deck’s Daniel Gross remit and internal “TBD Lab” naming are not promoted here to a freshly verified September reporting chain. [47][34]
Models and Copilot · linked leadership
Microsoft AI
Product and model responsibilities are separated, but the March memo deliberately keeps coordination and a dotted line.
Satya Nadella remains the parent-company CEO. Jacob Andreou leads the combined consumer and commercial Copilot experience; Mustafa Suleyman leads the superintelligence/model effort. Both report to Nadella. [38]
Models and Copilot experience
The memo groups Roslansky, Clarke, and Lamanna across M365 apps and the Copilot platform without assigning every subteam. Suleyman remains involved in operations and product strategy; “not the app” overstates the separation. [38]
The cited Microsoft–OpenAI agreement was announced October 28, 2025, not November. It permits independent or third-party AGI development. Partnership rights are a separate question from Microsoft’s internal reporting lines. [39]
The deck’s 500–650-person MAI estimate is not a count of all Microsoft AI employees. The report omits unsupported team-size, Build-release-count, and weekly-review assertions. [38]
PART II / THE NEXT WAVE
Smaller companies.
Distinct operating models.
These profiles extend the deck’s coverage. Inclusion is not a ranking of capability, compute, or commercial strength.
Focused research company
Safe Superintelligence
SSI’s own leadership update is more precise than “Daniel Levy still associated.”
The company’s announced focus is safe superintelligence as its sole product goal. That is a research and commercialization strategy, not evidence of a legal prohibition on intermediate products. [42]
Daniel Gross ceased to be part of SSI on June 29, 2025. A July 2026 update confirms an NVIDIA partnership; the deck’s investment amount and valuation are not necessary to establish leadership and are omitted. [41]
Research and product company
Thinking Machines Lab
The active leadership includes both a chief scientist and a CTO.
Murati remains founder and CEO. Reporting identifies Murati and Schulman as the two remaining co-founders, not Schulman alone. [46]
World-model research
AMI Labs
LeCun supplies scientific and board leadership; LeBrun runs the company.
Alexandre LeBrun is CEO; Yann LeCun is chair. The launch team also includes research and operating specialists. The current company page additionally lists Min Lin, without an executive title. [49][47]
Leadership and technical team
Automating scientific discovery
Discovery Loop
The lab has four named founders; its investor identifies Dean as CEO.
Google is a founding investor and Cloud partner; Discovery Loop is independent. [31]
The initial focus is automating machine-learning research and engineering, using the company as its own first customer. Other founder executive titles and internal reporting lines are not published in the sources reviewed. [50]
Founder-led model developer
DeepSeek
Founder visibility is stronger than public visibility into subordinate management.
Liang Wenfeng is the founder associated with High-Flyer. A detailed September employee hierarchy was not established in the reviewed sources. [52]
Leadership
The deck’s roughly 250-person figure is not carried forward as a current census. Its “not US-lab structured” description is replaced with the narrower observation that comparable reporting-line disclosure is limited. [52]
Models, infrastructure and enterprise products
Mistral AI
A three-founder leadership structure spans company direction, research, and engineering.
The company identifies Mensch, Lample, and Lacroix as its founders. Reporting distinguishes the research and infrastructure/product responsibilities. [53][54]
Mistral develops models as well as applications and infrastructure. Calling it merely an “application-layer challenger” understates its role. [53]
Enterprise models and applied AI
Cohere
The current company roster separates AI, technology, commercial, finance, and people leadership.
Aidan Gomez is co-founder and CEO. Nick Frosst and Ivan Zhang are also listed as co-founders; founder status alone does not establish their current management remit. [55]
Cohere builds foundation models and enterprise solutions. Its website’s open-science community size should not be confused with employee headcount. [55]
AI search and products
Perplexity
Separate the product company from the model providers it uses.
The founding group comprises Aravind Srinivas, Denis Yarats, Johnny Ho, and Andy Konwinski. The available profiles do not establish a complete current employee hierarchy. [56]
Perplexity combines models in a search and product experience. Shared founders, investors, or model suppliers should not be drawn as managerial reporting lines. [56]
INFRASTRUCTURE CONTEXT
NVIDIA also conducts research.
The deck’s infrastructure sidebar should not imply that NVIDIA has no research organization. Jensen Huang is founder, president and CEO; Bill Dally is Chief Scientist and SVP of NVIDIA Research. This is a distinct scope from the frontier-lab profiles above. [2][3]
FIND A PERSON
The leadership directory.
Search the named role holders in these profiles. Governance-only and historical departures remain in the relevant company notes.
DATED TRANSITIONS
How the map changed.
Announcement and reporting dates are shown below. They are not necessarily an employee’s first or final working day.
SSI formalizes Sutskever as CEO and Levy as President after Gross’s departure. [41]
Anthropic expands Labs around Mann and Krieger; Thinking Machines names Chintala CTO. [18][44]
SpaceX acquires xAI. [25]
Microsoft unifies Copilot experience under Andreou; Suleyman leads the model effort. [38]
Narasimhan joins Anthropic’s board; Trust-appointed directors become the majority. [20]
OpenAI reorganizes product leadership. [10]
Karpathy joins Anthropic pretraining; his earlier OpenAI tenure is not an immediate employer-to-employer transfer. [23]
Shazeer’s OpenAI move and Jumper’s Anthropic move are reported. [12][24]
Simo steps down; Weng’s return to OpenAI is reported. [13][45]
Cuéllar joins Anthropic global affairs and leaves the Trust. [21]
Lightcap announces his exit; OpenAI announces Rajic’s revenue appointment. [14][6]
Metz’s move to Meta is reported. [37]
THE FACT CHECK
A visible correction log.
The source is the 12-slide AI Lab Leadership Org Charts Sep 2026.pptx, dated September 5. This report refines its content; the original PowerPoint remains unchanged. “Held out” means insufficient evidence for publication here, not a finding that a claim is false.
Nick Turley — Head of ChatGPT
Turley moved to enterprise; Alexander took consumer products. Brockman’s product remit dates to May. [10]
One undifferentiated OpenAI board; nonprofit board + Altman “holds the vote”
Separate Foundation and Group boards. Foundation appointment rights control the Group; Kolter is a non-voting Group observer. July appointments add Vélez and Vince. [4][5]
Jason Matheny and Paul Christiano are current Trust members
Matheny left in December 2023; Christiano in April 2024. Cuéllar also left the Trust to take his August 2026 operating role. [19][21]
Board and LTBT membership combined
The Trust and corporate board are distinct. Trust-appointed directors already constituted a board majority in April 2026. [20]
All seven co-founders; Ben Mann also listed as co-founder
The deck’s own list contains eight named co-founders when Mann is included. The current leadership page and Labs announcement do not resolve a uniform founder-count convention; remove the absolute count. [17][18]
Dario has exactly one direct report; everyone else reports to Daniela
Company-confirmed wording is that Daniela manages the executive team. The exact single-direct-report assertion was not independently substantiated. [17]
SpaceX, xAI and Tesla leaders shown as one hierarchy
Show SpaceX ownership and corporate officers, then the reported AI operating role. Do not turn cross-company collaboration into an employee reporting chain. [26][28]
Hassabis chair / Kavukcuoglu operating leader
The August memo confirms this split; Kavukcuoglu is SVP. [31]
Muse Spark first shipped July 2026
Initial launch was April 8. July included Muse Spark 1.1 and expanded product capabilities. [35][36]
Four equally distinct MSL pillars and ~30 current Wang direct reports
Meta describes three functional areas, distinguishing FAIR within research. The January chart cannot establish a September direct-report count. [33][34]
Suleyman runs models, “not the app”
Andreou reports to Nadella but retains a dotted line to Suleyman, who stays involved in product strategy and operations. [38]
OpenAI agreement changed in November 2025
The referenced new agreement was announced October 28, 2025. [39]
Daniel Levy merely “still associated” with SSI
SSI explicitly names Levy President, with Sutskever CEO and the technical team reporting to Sutskever. [41]
John Schulman is the last original TML co-founder still in
Murati also remains. Add CTO Soumith Chintala; the source deck omitted that operating role. [44]
Weng left TML; destination omitted
July reporting also identifies her return to OpenAI. [45]
AMI is represented chiefly by LeCun
Add CEO Alexandre LeBrun and the named technical leadership; distinguish LeCun’s chair role. [49]
Discovery Loop founders without operating titles
Investor Radical Ventures identifies Jeff Dean as CEO. Other founders’ specific titles remain unspecified. [51]
Cross-lab headcounts, valuation estimates and IPO dates
Mixed dates and definitions prevent a comparable census. Funding rumors and IPO timing forecasts are excluded from this leadership report rather than presented as settled facts.
Unverified fine-grained remits and subteam ownership
Aditya Ramesh’s “Worldism” title, Karpathy’s exact manager, certain SpaceX-adjacent roles, Daniel Gross’s precise current Meta remit, and asserted counts of people or releases require stronger current sourcing.
METHOD & LIMITS
A public-source reconstruction.
Research cutoff: September 5, 2026. Company pages and linked sources were checked for this edition. Undated pages are marked as live pages; older announcements establish appointments, with later evidence used where found. No internal HR records were accessed.
Source priority: company statements, filings, and executive memos first; then named reporting and public biographies. The source deck’s generic references to TIME, The Information, Reuters, and X are not themselves evidence. Paywalled org charts were not treated as fully inspected; the register identifies public-overview use.
Uncertainty: appointment announcements do not always specify start dates, and a current website can omit a leader or retain outdated text. The OpenAI board and Anthropic Trust examples show why later notices must be reconciled with standing pages. An omitted person should not be interpreted as having left a company.
Scope: this is a leadership and governance report, not a comprehensive roster or global ranking. Headcounts, compensation packages, speculative valuations, IPO forecasts, precise unpublished spans of control, and ancillary release-count claims are excluded. The core company set follows the supplied deck; it does not comprehensively cover China or the infrastructure industry.
Analysis: descriptions of operating models and their implications are editorial synthesis. Titles and dated events carry citations; inferred equal authority, shared budgets, or undisclosed reporting chains are not drawn as facts.
EVIDENCE
The source register.
Each numbered citation opens the supporting source. Publication dates and source types help distinguish an original announcement from later reporting.
- 01Meta — Executive biographies
Company · Live page checked · Accessed September 5, 2026
- 02NVIDIA — Jensen Huang biography
Company · Live page checked · Accessed September 5, 2026
- 03NVIDIA — Bill Dally biography
Company · Live page checked · Accessed September 5, 2026
- 04OpenAI — Our structure
Company · 2025-10-28; live page checked · Accessed September 5, 2026
- 05OpenAI — David Vélez and Robin Vince join both boards
Company · 2026-07-21 · Accessed September 5, 2026
- 06OpenAI — Dali Rajic appointed Chief Revenue Officer
Company · 2026-08-13 · Accessed September 5, 2026
- 07OpenAI — Leadership updates
Company · 2025-03-24 · Accessed September 5, 2026
- 08OpenAI — Jakub Pachocki appointed Chief Scientist
Company · 2024-05-14 · Accessed September 5, 2026
- 09OpenAI — Sarah Friar on the finance organization
Company · 2026-08-10 · Accessed September 5, 2026
- 10WIRED — Brockman takes control of OpenAI products
Reporting; company confirmation · 2026-05-15 · Accessed September 5, 2026
- 11VivaTech — Day two digest: OpenAI core product leadership
Event organizer · 2026-06-18 · Accessed September 5, 2026
- 12Axios — Noam Shazeer leaves Google for OpenAI
Reporting · 2026-06-18 · Accessed September 5, 2026
- 13TechCrunch — Fidji Simo steps down
Reporting · 2026-07-09 · Accessed September 5, 2026
- 14Axios — Brad Lightcap is leaving OpenAI
Reporting · 2026-08-11 · Accessed September 5, 2026
- 15TechCrunch — Dane Stuckey joins OpenAI security leadership
Reporting; historical appointment · 2024-10-15 · Accessed September 5, 2026
- 16OpenAI Forum — Jason Kwon discusses the Foundation
Company · 2025-10 · Accessed September 5, 2026
- 17Anthropic — Leadership
Company · Live page checked · Accessed September 5, 2026
- 18Anthropic — Introducing Labs
Company · 2026-01 · Accessed September 5, 2026
- 19Anthropic — Long-Term Benefit Trust, including membership footnotes
Company · 2023-09-19; subsequently updated · Accessed September 5, 2026
- 20Anthropic — Narasimhan appointment; Trust-appointed board majority
Company · 2026-04-14 · Accessed September 5, 2026
- 21Anthropic — Tino Cuéllar joins global affairs, leaves Trust
Company · 2026-08-04 · Accessed September 5, 2026
- 22Reuters — Cuéllar reports to Daniela Amodei
Reporting; company spokesperson · 2026-08-04 · Accessed September 5, 2026
- 23Axios — Andrej Karpathy joins Anthropic pretraining
Reporting; company confirmation · 2026-05-19 · Accessed September 5, 2026
- 24Bloomberg — John Jumper moves from DeepMind to Anthropic
Reporting · 2026-06-19 · Accessed September 5, 2026
- 25xAI — xAI joins SpaceX
Company · 2026-02-02 · Accessed September 5, 2026
- 26SpaceX — June 5 European prospectus
Corporate filing · 2026-06-05 · Accessed September 5, 2026
- 27Bloomberg — Inside the identity crisis at Musk’s AI company
Reporting · 2026-08 · Accessed September 5, 2026
- 28Benzinga — SpaceX operators join xAI oversight (Bloomberg reporting)
Secondary reporting · 2026-05 · Accessed September 5, 2026
- 29Techzine — xAI officially becomes SpaceXAI
Reporting · 2026-07-07 · Accessed September 5, 2026
- 30Fast Company — Inside the xAI exodus
Reporting · 2026-04-24 · Accessed September 5, 2026
- 31Google — The next chapter of our AI momentum
Company; executive memo · 2026-08-05 · Accessed September 5, 2026
- 32Team4Tech — Lila Ibrahim biography
Affiliated organization · Live page checked · Accessed September 5, 2026
- 33Meta — Q3 2025 follow-up earnings call: MSL structure
Company; investor transcript · 2025-10 · Accessed September 5, 2026
- 34The Information — Meta Superintelligence Labs org chart
Reporting; public overview only · 2026-01-23 · Accessed September 5, 2026
- 35Meta — Introducing Muse Spark
Company · 2026-04-08; updated May · Accessed September 5, 2026
- 36Meta — Muse Spark 1.1 powers new Meta AI actions
Company · 2026-07-24 · Accessed September 5, 2026
- 37The Next Web — Luke Metz joins Meta
Reporting · 2026-08-25 · Accessed September 5, 2026
- 38Microsoft — Copilot leadership update
Company; executive memo · 2026-03-17 · Accessed September 5, 2026
- 39Microsoft — New OpenAI partnership agreement
Company · 2025-10-28 · Accessed September 5, 2026
- 40Microsoft — AI Decision Brief with CTO Kevin Scott
Company · 2026-03-31 · Accessed September 5, 2026
- 41SSI — Leadership and partnership updates
Company · 2025-07-03; 2026-07-26 · Accessed September 5, 2026
- 42SSI — Mission and product roadmap
Company · Live page checked · Accessed September 5, 2026
- 43Thinking Machines Lab — Company and products
Company · Live page checked · Accessed September 5, 2026
- 44Built In — Thinking Machines leadership and milestones
Reporting · 2026-08-04 · Accessed September 5, 2026
- 45The Next Web — Lilian Weng returns to OpenAI
Reporting · 2026-07-29 · Accessed September 5, 2026
- 46The Information — Murati and Schulman remain at Thinking Machines
Reporting; public excerpt · 2026-07 · Accessed September 5, 2026
- 47AMI Labs — Team and research direction
Company · Live page checked · Accessed September 5, 2026
- 48AMI Labs — Official launch
Company · 2026-03-10 · Accessed September 5, 2026
- 49Le Monde — AMI leadership and launch
Reporting · 2026-03-10 · Accessed September 5, 2026
- 50Discovery Loop — Founders and approach
Company · Live page checked · Accessed September 5, 2026
- 51Radical Ventures — Discovery Loop leadership
Investor · Live page checked · Accessed September 5, 2026
- 52Axios — DeepSeek founder and financing report
Reporting · 2026-06-03 · Accessed September 5, 2026
- 53Mistral — About the company and founders
Company · Live page checked · Accessed September 5, 2026
- 54Le Monde — Mistral founder roles
Reporting · 2026-01-18 · Accessed September 5, 2026
- 55Cohere — Executive team
Company · Live page checked · Accessed September 5, 2026
- 56Forbes — Perplexity company profile
Reporting · Live page checked · Accessed September 5, 2026
- 57Forbes — Denis Yarats profile
Reporting · 2026-08; live page checked · Accessed September 5, 2026