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A sweeping congressional release of Jeffrey Epstein’s correspondence has triggered its first high-profile fallout inside the AI industry.
A sweeping congressional release of Jeffrey Epstein’s correspondence has triggered its first high-profile fallout inside the AI industry. Just days after lawmakers opened hundreds of pages of Epstein’s emails to public scrutiny, Larry Summers has abruptly stepped down from OpenAI’s board.
The documents detail years of exchanges that have prompted new questions about Summers’s conduct and his ties to the disgraced financier.
The Immediate Fallout
Summers — a former U.S. Treasury Secretary, former Harvard president and current professor — resigned shortly after Congress voted to make the Epstein files public. As The Harvard Crimson reported, the university will launch its own inquiry into his connections with Epstein, and Summers will scale back his public-facing commitments.
His exit from OpenAI followed a steady drip of disclosures from a House panel, which released email threads spanning late 2018 through mid-2019. In these messages, Summers repeatedly sought Epstein’s advice on a personal relationship involving a woman he described as a mentee.
Exchanges Under Scrutiny
The emails show Summers acknowledging power dynamics in the relationship. In a March 2019 message, he wrote: “She must be very confused or maybe wants to cut me off but wants professional connection a lot and so holds to it.”
Epstein — who early in their exchanges referred to himself as Summers’s “wing man” — responded in June 2019: “She is doomed to be with you.”
Later messages reveal Summers suggesting his “best shot” at beginning a sexual relationship was the woman’s reliance on him professionally, writing that “she can’t have it without romance/sex.” Throughout that period, Epstein urged him to take what he called the “long game” and keep her in a “forced holding pattern.”
Wider Context
The correspondence took place just months before Epstein’s July 2019 arrest on federal charges of sex trafficking of minors and conspiracy. He died in jail weeks later.
The new disclosures have reopened scrutiny into Epstein’s network, with Summers becoming one of the first current leaders in the tech sector to face direct consequences since the files’ release. Lawmakers have signaled that additional revelations from the document cache may prompt further investigations.
Source: The Harvard Crimson, Techcrunch
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