Mira Murati is the founder and CEO of Thinking Machines Lab (2025–present) and the former Chief Technology Officer of OpenAI (2022–September 2024), where she briefly served as interim CEO during the November 2023 board crisis. She is Albanian-American, studied mechanical engineering at Dartmouth, and worked at Tesla and Leap Motion before joining OpenAI.
Background
Murati joined OpenAI in 2018 and became Chief Technology Officer in 2022. As CTO she oversaw the launch of ChatGPT (November 2022), GPT-4 (March 2023), and the early deployment infrastructure that turned OpenAI from a research lab into a consumer and enterprise product company. During the November 2023 board crisis she was named interim CEO for roughly 48 hours, between Altman's firing and his reinstatement.
She left OpenAI in September 2024, announcing the departure alongside several other senior figures including Bob McGrew (Chief Research Officer) and Barret Zoph (VP Research). In early 2025 she founded Thinking Machines Lab, which raised a reported roughly $2B seed round, among the largest reported to date, and has recruited heavily from OpenAI and Anthropic.
Thinking Machines Lab
Thinking Machines Lab's announced focus includes alignment research, model interpretability, and "making AI systems more widely understood." The lab had not published a detailed policy posture as of early 2026, and public information on its technical agenda remained limited as of April 2026.
Positions on AI policy
During her OpenAI tenure Murati publicly advocated for "iterative deployment" as a safety mechanism: the thesis that controlled public release produces better evidence than closed development. She testified before the US Senate in 2023 on AI risks and deployment practices. In public remarks she has been supportive of regulatory frameworks, taking a less strident posture than many peers.
As CTO she oversaw safety evaluations and red-teaming, with public framing that emphasized empirical testing over theoretical alignment.
Musk v. Altman deposition
In a video deposition dated May 6, 2026, in Musk v. Altman, Murati testified that Sam Altman lied to her by claiming OpenAI's legal department had cleared a new GPT model from going through the deployment safety board. She said general counsel Jason Kwon's account contradicted Altman's, and that she sent the model through the board anyway. The deposition was Murati's most material public statement about Altman's credibility since the November 2023 board crisis (Source: theverge.com). See Musk v. Altman (and OpenAI / Microsoft / Brockman).
Relationships
- related: OpenAI — former CTO
- related: Sam Altman — worked under him as CTO; interim CEO during his firing
- related: Ilya Sutskever — OpenAI colleague; parallel trajectory of leaving to found safety-adjacent lab (SSI)
- related: AI Safety Frameworks — "iterative deployment" framing she advanced
Notes
Thinking Machines Lab is flagged as a Priority 2 missing company page in missing coverage. Public information on the lab's technical agenda remained limited as of April 2026; confidence on Murati's current-role positions is therefore medium rather than high.