“After nearly five years at OpenAI and a lot of reflection, I’ve decided it’s time for me to step back and move into my next chapter,” said OpenAI’s former chief communications officer (CCO) Hannah Wong in a January 2026 LinkedIn post announcing her departure.

That was nine months ago—practically a lifetime in the fast-moving AI world—and Wong’s role remains empty.

The absence of a chief communications officer is particularly remarkable given the year OpenAI has had. For much of 2026, the company has lurched from crisis to crisis: A controversial deal with the Pentagon, a high-stakes courtroom showdown with Elon Musk, a swarm of agents that hacked Hugging Face and made international headlines, an Apple lawsuit alleging trade-secrets theft, and more. Along the way, OpenAI’s corporate reputation has taken a hit, and public trust in AI is cratering.

The company’s future chief communications officer will need to untangle all of these threads. It’s not a role for the faint of heart, but could be a career-defining opportunity for the right person—and a rare opportunity to claim significant equity before the company goes public. (CEO Sam Altman recently told Fortune the company would not IPO before 2027, and the company is reportedly exploring raising a private round of funding that would value the company at as much as $1.5 trillion).

The combination of novel communications challenges and a potentially life-changing payout would seem to be an irresistible set-up for any number of crisis and communications professionals at the top of their game. Yet OpenAI has struggled to fill the role, and recently tapped a headhunting firm to assist in the process.

In a statement to Fortune, OpenAI said it’s looking for the right person for the role; it is not rushing to hire until it finds them.

Depending on when OpenAI plans to go public, however, the need to fill the role may become more pressing. “The issue isn’t whether OpenAI can operate without a chief communications officer. They most certainly can,” Paul Argenti, who has been teaching corporate communications at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business for 45 years, tells Fortune.

“The issue is whether they are going to face constant controversy, [and] whether recurring reputation challenges lead investors to assign a higher risk premium, and that would be a lower IPO valuation.”

After the top candidate says “no,” OpenAI ramps up its search

OpenAI’s top choice, Jill Hazelbaker of Uber, turned down the role in the spring, according to a source familiar with the search who agreed to speak on the condition of anonymity. Hazelbaker has been at Uber for almost 11 years, and was promoted in May to President and Chief Corporate Affairs Officer. She declined to comment for this article, but those who know her list a few reasons she may have turned it down.

“Jill is absolutely fantastic,” said another source who has spoken directly with OpenAI about the position, and who commented on the likely reasons the company has not been able to hire her. “She’s very mature. She has an awesome relationship with [Uber CEO] Dara [Khosrowshahi]. She makes a f*ckload of money.” Also, the source said, she’s lives on the East Coast and has a family, so “it’s really, really hard to get her because she lives in D.C. and she’s not going to move.”

This summer OpenAI ramped up its recruiting efforts. After its internal recruiters hit a wall with the process, the company enlisted executive search firm Daversa Partners, which has worked with OpenAI in the past, according to one of the sources familiar with the search. The pool of eligible candidates willing and able to take on such a high-pressure, high-profile role is relatively small, three sources said. Daversa declined to comment.

In the meantime, the company has assembled a team to oversee its IPO-related messaging. In July, it hired industry veteran Josh King as a Vice President of Communications, who now oversees all financial communications. The company has also retained an outside PR firm, Brunswick Group, to support King, with a focus on the IPO.

The structure and seniority of the role remains in flux

One major question OpenAI has wrestled with, one source familiar with the search said, is how senior to make the communications role. Should the person report directly to OpenAI president and co-founder Greg Brockman, who is reportedly hiring for the role instead of Altman, which would be most attractive for a big name like Hazelbaker? Or, should it sit further down on the chain, reporting to the Chief Marketing Officer? That C-suite position has also been vacant since April, when Kate Rouch stepped down, citing her battle with cancer, and the CMO will likely work hand-in-hand with the CCO.

“The search has been going on so long that they’re now going, ‘Okay, what are the options? What should the reporting structure be?,’” one of the sources said. “They’re open to anything because it seems like the search so far hasn’t worked out.”“

The seniority of the role is important, in that the candidate will need enough authority to challenge senior leaders and effectively advise them, according to Bill Margaritis, who led communications at FedEx for 15 years. They’ll need to address the short-term trust issues while also building up a long-term strategy that makes future crises easier to absorb and move on from.

“A seasoned CCO would be at the table assessing risk, helping management see around corners,” Margaritis said. “They’re an early warning system for the enterprise.

The role also involves balancing the needs of multiple stakeholders, including the capital markets for the IPO, customers, regulators, internal employees and more, Margaritis said. The situation is complex: “Right now there’s a perfect storm between the technology story, the safety security story, the regulatory story, and the reputation imperative.”

Reputation-wise, OpenAI is trailing its rivals. It ranks 68 in Axios Harris’s 2026 poll of most trusted American companies, while Anthropic sits at number 15 and Nvidia at number 4. Outside of OpenAI, the public is increasingly wary of AI overall; an August survey from Pew Research found just 8% of Americans are “more excited than concerned” about AI, down from 18% in 2021.

The current team is growing, and responding faster to scandals

OpenAI’s communications roster is well-staffed with experienced comms professionals, most with experience at other technology companies, such as Meta and Twitter, and it’s growing. This team is on the front lines when scandals arise, stepping in to manage the messaging, for example by crafting OpenAI’s official response in blog posts and statements.

Chris Lehane, OpenAI’s Chief Global Affairs Officer who formerly led communications at Airbnb, has been overseeing the team, among his other responsibilities. Kelly Sims, an employee at OpenAI investor Thrive Capital, is also pitching in to manage Altman’s communications.OpenAI

In recent months, OpenAI has become faster at responding to public controversies. For example, after Reuters reported on Sept. 4 that its AI agents had co-opted an obscure German wikipedia page to use as a messaging board, OpenAI put out a statement a day later. It promised a framework for disclosing misalignment incidents, which it indeed unveiled a few weeks later on Sept. 16.

But that may not be a sustainable approach for a company of OpenAI’s size and one playing so a central role in the AI revolution.

CEO Sam Altman says the AI industry has done a ‘terrible’ job at communicating the technology’s benefits

Some say the public backlash to AI, and OpenAI, is partly because messaging from the leading labs can be esoteric, rather than grounded in the day-to-day benefits of AI, and in some cases, downright frightening.

“It’s terrible. [AI companies] are like, ‘We are Borgs, and all we talk is Borg language,’” said one of sources Fortune spoke to. “Speak English and stop talking about how you’ve achieved AGI…[while] the rest of the world is like, ‘Wait, what is happening to us?’”

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman agrees. In a September interview with Bloomberg, he said the AI industry has done a “terrible job” of explaining how AI benefits ordinary Americans. At the same time, Altman has stoked fears about the technology, for example saying he was surprised that more people didn’t feel the gravity of the Hugging Face incident as “viscerally” as he did.

In his interview with Fortune this month, Altman also expressed frustration that the public may not believe OpenAI prioritizes AI safety over profits: “If you’re like ‘Oh, OpenAI is not going to pause because they’re worried about it costing their business money,'[then] you very deeply misunderstand us. So … I’m sorry that you misunderstand us because I think that means we’ve done a bad job of communicating, and that’s on us.”

Given the mixed messages, it’s no surprise the public isn’t quite sure what to think of AI. Making matters worse, multiple industry insiders appear concerned about where the technology is headed. This month, former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon went viral on social media after quitting the company and claiming that “the people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”

Quelling fears of human extinction is quite the job description, but it will presumably be a core responsibility for OpenAI’s future communications leader, if and when the company hires one.