Ilya Sutskever, one of the world’s top artificial intelligence experts and the co-founder of OpenAI, has left the company six months after he took part in a failed coup against the chief executive Sam Altman.

Sutskever, who held the role of chief scientist, and is, Altman remarked, “easily one of the greatest minds of our generation”, said he had left to work on a new project.

He is just the latest and most high-profile person involved in safety and governance to leave the company, reigniting speculation about friction between the commercial and charitable goals of the leading artificial intelligence business.

Jan Leike, co-leading Superalignment at the business, a role ensuring AI systems align with human values and ethics, stepped down this week, posting simply: “I resigned’ on X with no explanation.

Daniel Kokotajlo, a safety worker, resigned last month saying that he had lost confidence in the company’s ability to “behave responsibly” around AI and William Saunders, also in Superalignment, left in February.

The changes come at a pivotal time for the business, just days after OpenAI announced the launch of its most advanced AI model to date, GPT-4o, which is capable of realistic voice conversation and has the ability to interact with both text and images.

The company has been dogged by rumours of disagreements over how best to implement its stated mission “to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity” which goes back to its inception in 2015.

OpenAI was founded as a non-profit organisation. However, in order to continue its expensive work, it created a “for-profit’ division and took a huge investment from Microsoft, a private business. Elon Musk, a co-founder, recently sued OpenAI, accusing it of betraying these altruistic roots.

Sutskever was one of the board members who temporarily ousted Altman from his role as chief executive six months ago, in an episode that saw Altman fired and rehired over the course of a tumultuous weekend.

The unsuccessful coup, referred to internally as “the blip”, came after a clash of opinion over the direction of the business.

“After almost a decade, I have made the decision to leave OpenAI. The company’s trajectory has been nothing short of miraculous,” Sutskever wrote on X/Twitter.

He added that he was working on something that is “very personally meaningful to me about which I will share details in due time”.

In an announcement on OpenAI’s blog, Altman said: “Ilya and OpenAI are going to part ways. This is very sad to me; Ilya is easily one of the greatest minds of our generation, a guiding light of our field, and a dear friend”.

Founded in 2015, the Microsoft-backed start-up is behind ChatGPT, and a leader in the race to develop generative artificial intelligence, but this has reportedly led to disagreements over how it is implemented.

After Altman’s removal, more than 700 OpenAI employees signed an open letter to the board, threatening to leave the business unless all board members stood down and Altman was reinstated.

Days after attempting to oust Altman, Sutskever signed the employee letter calling for his return and said he regretted his “participation in the board’s actions”.

Sutskever is a prominent AI researcher and investor in his own right. He worked as a researcher at Google before, for a reported $1.9 million salary he was poached by the OpenAI founding team, which included Elon Musk.

It led to a row with the Google co-founder Larry Page, who was furious that Musk would take one of his top scientists. “Larry felt betrayed and was really mad at me for personally recruiting Ilya, and refused to hang out with me anymore,” Musk was quoted as saying in a 2023 biography by Walter Isaacson.

Jakub Pachocki will take over the role of chief scientist at OpenAI. He was previously director of research at the company and led the development of GPT-4 and OpenAI Five.