OpenAI’s search for a chief communications officer hits 9 months after its top candidate turned down the role

OpenAI has been hunting for a chief communications officer for nine months, and the seat is still empty after Hannah Wong walked away in January 2026. That gap now looks a lot less like a normal hiring delay and a lot more like a symptom of a company that keeps stepping into messes faster than it can clean them up.

The list is not short. There’s the Pentagon deal that drew criticism, the courtroom fight with Elon Musk, the Hugging Face incident, and an Apple lawsuit over trade-secrets theft. All of that has landed while public trust in AI keeps sliding and OpenAI’s own reputation takes more damage.

OpenAI’s first choice for the role, Uber’s Jill Hazelbaker, turned it down in the spring, according to a source familiar with the search. That forced the company to widen the hunt and bring in Daversa Partners after its internal recruiters hit a wall. OpenAI says it is looking for the right person and is not rushing.

The job is also tangled up in reporting lines and status. One question inside the company is whether the communications lead should report to Greg Brockman or further down the chain to the chief marketing officer, a post that has been vacant since April after Kate Rouch stepped down because of cancer. In the meantime, OpenAI has built a temporary support structure: Josh King now handles financial communications, reporting to CFO Sarah Friar, and Brunswick Group has been brought in for IPO support.

That IPO angle is the real prize. Sam Altman has said OpenAI will not go public before 2027, but the company is also reportedly exploring a private round that could value it at as much as $1.5 trillion. For a communications executive, that is both the headache and the hook: a chance to manage one of the loudest companies in tech while trying to keep investors from pricing in every fresh controversy.