Larry Summers to Stop Teaching at Harvard While It Investigates His Epstein Ties

The former Harvard president had previously stepped down from other positions following revelations about his longtime connections to Jeffrey Epstein.

Lawrence H. Summers, a Harvard University economist and the university’s former president, will step back from his teaching duties while the university investigates his ties to the disgraced financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, a spokesman for Mr. Summers said Wednesday.

The spokesman, Steven Goldberg, said in a statement that Mr. Summers would also leave his role as director of the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at the Harvard Kennedy School. A Harvard spokesman confirmed that Mr. Summers had told the university of his decision, which was first reported by the Harvard Crimson.

His spokesman said that his co-teachers will finish instructing his classes this semester, and he was not scheduled to teach next semester. But Mr. Summers will keep his tenured status at Harvard while he pauses teaching during the investigation, and he is only on leave at the Mossavar-Rahmani Center.

Mr. Summers has expressed regret for maintaining his connection to Mr. Epstein after the financier had gone to jail. Just hours earlier, Mr. Summers also resigned from the board of OpenAI, which he joined in 2023 after a failed boardroom coup briefly ousted the company’s chief executive, Sam Altman.

Mr. Summers’s connection with Mr. Epstein had been known for years. But a tranche of emails that a House committee released last week revealed a cozy relationship between the two men, who exchanged messages after Mr. Epstein served jail time for sex crimes with minors. Among other topics, the men discussed a woman in whom Mr. Summers, who is married, was romantically interested. Mr. Epstein described himself as Mr. Summers’s wingman.

At OpenAI, Mr. Summers was seen as instrumental to repairing the fractured board, working with additional independent directors including Bret Taylor, a former Salesforce executive, and Paul M. Nakasone, a retired U.S. Army general. He sat on different board committees, including one responsible for auditing the company’s finances.

Over the past two years, OpenAI has since stabilized and gone on to attract tens of billions of dollars in private capital investment while developing closer ties with the federal government. President Trump has said that A.I. development is key to the country’s economic future.

Mr. Summers was also a part of helping the company, which started as a nonprofit, adopt a new for-profit structure last month. The long-sought change allows OpenAI to operate like a more traditional business, while it continues to raise the enormous sums of money it needs to develop artificial intelligence. The company is currently valued at more than $500 billion. (The Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft, claiming copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems. The two companies have denied the suit’s claims.)

“We appreciate his many contributions and the perspective he brought to the board,” OpenAI’s board of directors said in a statement to The Times on Wednesday.

Mr. Summers has shed a number of other positions this week, after saying on Monday that he was stepping back from public commitments to focus on rebuilding trust and repairing relations. He has severed relationships with the Center for American Progress and the Center for Global Development, two think tanks. The New York Times Opinion section said in a statement that it would not renew Mr. Summers’s contract as a contributing writer.

On Monday, Senator Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat, urged Harvard to cut ties with Mr. Summers.

Videos posted online Tuesday showed Mr. Summers briefly addressing his communications with Mr. Epstein to a lecture hall of students.

“Some of you will have seen my statement of regret, expressing my shame with respect to what I did in communication with Mr. Epstein,” Mr. Summers told the class. “And that I’ve said that I’m going to step back from public activities, but — for a time — but that I think it’s very important that I fulfill my teaching obligations.”

He changed his mind a day later.

Mr. Epstein, who died by suicide in jail in 2019, had a long relationship with Harvard, donating more than $9 million before he pleaded guilty to sex crimes in 2008, according to a 2020 Harvard report.

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