By Deborah Mary Sophia and Daniel Trotta
(Reuters) -Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers stepped down from positions at Harvard University and the OpenAI board on Wednesday amid the continuing fallout from his ties to the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Summers announced he was resigning from the board of OpenAI, developer of the ChatGPT artificial intelligence tool, and a spokesman later said he would discontinue teaching roles at Harvard and go on leave as a director of a business and government school while Harvard conducts a review of people named in the Epstein files.
The former Treasury Secretary under former Democratic President Bill Clinton, Summers is among the highest-level U.S. personalities to pay a price for his relationship to Epstein, who was charged for sex trafficking before he died in a Manhattan jail cell in 2019. His death was ruled a suicide.
Summers has been under fire since the U.S. House Oversight Committee released documents detailing an ongoing personal correspondence between Summers and Epstein.
The documents show that Summers continued to stay in touch with Epstein after his 2008 conviction, asking him at one point for relationship advice. No evidence has surfaced that he was involved in sex trafficking with Epstein.
“Mr. Summers has decided it’s in the best interest of the Center for him to go on leave from his role as Director as Harvard undertakes its review. His co-teachers will complete the remaining three class sessions of the courses he has been teaching with them this semester, and he is not scheduled to teach next semester,” spokesperson Steven Goldberg said in a statement on Wednesday.
Summer had served as the director of the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at the Harvard Kennedy School.
Summers, also a former president of Harvard University, said on Monday he would step back from all public commitments to allow him “to rebuild trust and repair relationships with the people closest to me.”
The news of Summers’ resignations came as U.S. President Donald Trump signed a bill to release the U.S. Justice Department’s investigative files on Epstein. Trump, who has said he had no connection to Epstein’s crimes, had fought that outcome for months before ending his opposition recently.
NEW YORK TIMES WILL NOT RENEW SUMMERS’ CONTRACT
Summers had served on the OpenAI board since late 2023, following the brief ouster of the ChatGPT maker’s CEO, Sam Altman.
Several other organizations, including the Peterson Institute for International Economics and the Center for American Progress, confirmed that Summers was stepping away from his associations with them.
The New York Times said it would not renew a one-year contributor contract it signed with him in January. Spain’s Santander said Wednesday he had resigned from an international advisory board he chaired for the bank.
Harvard said Wednesday it would open a probe into individuals mentioned in the Epstein files recently released by Congress, although the statement did not mention Summers by name.
The university review will look into all other Harvard affiliates mentioned in the documents released by the House, including Summers’ wife and nearly a dozen other Harvard affiliates, past and present, the Crimson student newspaper said.
Reuters could not immediately verify all details of the Crimson report.
The Epstein scandal has been a political thorn in Trump’s side for months, partly because he amplified conspiracy theories about Epstein to his own supporters. It was one of the reasons cited for the decline in his approval ratings, which fell to a new low of 38% in Reuters/Ipsos polling this week. Just 20% of Americans approve of how Trump has handled the issue.
(Reporting Deborah Sophia in Bengaluru and Daniel Trotta in Carlsbad, California; additional reporting by Anhata Rooprai, Akash Sriram in Bengaluru and Kanishka Singh in Washington; Editing by Shilpi Majumdar, Anil D’Silva, Rod Nickel, Kate Mayberry and Noeleen Walder)
