Meta executive leaves for OpenAI as the social media giant faces growing scrutiny in India
TechCrunch Jagmeet Singh
Meta’s India and Southeast Asia boss is jumping to OpenAI. It comes as Meta faces more heat in India, and OpenAI keeps building its Asia team.
Based on reporting by TechCrunch, Jagmeet Singh — read the original for the full story.
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Meta is losing one of its top regional executives to OpenAI. Sandhya Devanathan, who has led India and Southeast Asia for the social media company, is leaving after more than a decade at Meta and will join the ChatGPT maker in Singapore, OpenAI told TechCrunch.
At OpenAI, Devanathan will report to Asia-Pacific managing director Kiran Mani. Her remit is broad: consumer growth, enterprise adoption and partnerships, regulatory engagement, and operations across Southeast Asia and Australia. The timing is notable. OpenAI only recently brought in Prabhjeet Singh as its India head, after his own long run at Uber.
Devanathan’s move also fits a wider push by OpenAI across the region. Over the past two years, the company has opened offices in Singapore, Tokyo, Seoul, Sydney and Delhi. It is building out local leadership while trying to look more present, and more credible, in markets that matter.
For Meta, the departure lands during a rough patch in India. The company has faced growing scrutiny over online safety and content moderation, and Indian authorities have been leaning on it more hard. Earlier this month, Meta apologized after Instagram wrongly restricted a post by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in July, and New Delhi summoned executives including chief global affairs officer Joel Kaplan over the case.
The pressure has not stopped there. Indian officials have also raised concerns about child sexual abuse material on Meta’s platforms. Last month, the government sought an explanation after a BBC report pointed to Instagram ads that allegedly offered access to such content. Meta said it removed violating ads and accounts, denied knowingly targeting users with those ads, and said it had removed 160,000 accounts in India over six months based on signals tied to child-exploitative activity.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is what happens when a platform spends years acting like policy is somebody else’s problem. OpenAI is hiring people who can work governments and markets at the same time; Meta is stuck explaining why its systems keep embarrassing it in public. In India, that’s not a minor PR headache, it’s the price of being too big to ignore.
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