Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers has stepped down from the board of OpenAI and is facing a Harvard probe amid mounting backlash over his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.
Both Summers and the tech giant confirmed his resignation Wednesday in statements to Axios.
It comes as Harvard University, where Summers formerly served as president, launches a fresh probe of his ties to the disgraced financier.
“In line with my announcement to step away from my public commitments, I have also decided to resign from the board of OpenAI,” the former White House aide told Axios. “I am grateful for the opportunity to have served, excited about the potential of the company and look forward to following their progress.”
Neither Summers nor Harvard University have yet issued a statement on the college’s fresh review of his ties to Epstein. While Summers, 70, has said he is “deeply ashamed” of his relationship with the sex trafficker, he has lately said he will continue teaching economics at the university.
The news of his resignation from OpenAI comes after Congress released more than 20,000 new documents from the Epstein estate, among them emails and text messages spanning almost the three decades prior to the disgraced financier’s 2019 death in police custody while awaiting prosecution on sex trafficking charges.
Harvard had previously released a report on its own ties with Epstein, including gifts and donations totaling more than $9 million between 1998 and 2008, while Summers has faced increasing scrutiny over his relationship with the pedophile in the years since Epstein’s death.
That scrutiny has rapidly intensified following last week’s email and message dump by the House. The tranche contains friendly exchanges between Summers and Epstein dating from 2017 to 2019—long after Epstein’s 2008 conviction for soliciting prostitution from a minor—in which they often appeared to discuss the professor’s relationship with an unnamed woman.
Messages between the two men, reviewed and published by The Harvard Crimson on Monday, show Summers, who’s been married since 2005, appears to have routinely sought Epstein’s advice on pursuing women.
Emails exchanged between November 2018 and July 5, 2019, the night before Epstein’s arrest, show the pair referring to a woman with the nickname “peril.”
Critics argue the term echoes the racist “yellow peril” stereotype from the turn of the 20th century, a trope once used by public figures and newspapers to fuel fear that Asian immigrants threatened Western jobs, culture, and social purity.
Other missives show Summers forwarding the woman’s academic correspondence to Epstein, who labeled her “needy” and encouraged Summers to take the “long game,” according to the Crimson’s review.
In one exchange, Summers expresses concern that she might seek access to his professional network, prompting Epstein to respond that “she is doomed to be with you.” The financier later joked that the probability of Summers being “in bed again with peril” is “0,” and assured him “she is never ever going to find another Larry summers.”
In some of the messages, Summers appears to be referring to Keyu Jin, 43, a Chinese Harvard-trained macroeconomist whose work-related emails were passed on to Epstein.
The Daily Beast has reached out to Summers and Harvard University for comment on this story.
