(Reuters) -Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers has resigned from the OpenAI board, Axios reported on Wednesday, after President Donald Trump ordered the Justice Department to investigate his and other prominent Democrats’ ties to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
OpenAI and representatives for Summers did not immediately respond to Reuters’ requests for comment. Reuters could not immediately verify the report.
Summers, also a former president of Harvard University, said on Monday he would step back from all public commitments, adding that the move would was to allow him “to rebuild trust and repair relationships with the people closest to me.”
Harvard University will open a new probe into Summers’ connections with Epstein, the University’s newspaper reported on Tuesday.
The Republican-controlled U.S. Congress voted almost unanimously on Tuesday to force the release of DOJ files on Epstein, an outcome Trump had fought for months before ending his opposition.
Many Trump voters believe his administration has covered up Epstein’s ties to powerful figures and obscured details surrounding his death, which was ruled a suicide, in a Manhattan jail in 2019.
(Reporting by Deborah Sophia in Bengaluru; Editing by Shilpi Majumdar)
