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larry summers
Institutions Urged to Cut Ties With Larry Summers After Latest Epstein Revelations
"These latest revelations ought to be the final straw," said a Summers critic.
Nov 13, 2025
Economist Larry Summers, a former president of Harvard University and top economic policy official under Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, is facing increased scrutiny after emails released this week showed he maintained a friendly relationship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein even after he served a term in prison for soliciting a minor.
The emails, which were released by investigators in the House of Representatives on Wednesday, revealed that Summers regularly conversed with Epstein on a wide range of topics, years after Epstein victims had filed lawsuits against him and his associates that contained lurid details about his alleged underage sex-trafficking ring.
In one email, flagged by writer Jon Schwarz, the then-64-year-old Summers asked Epstein for advice about a woman he appeared to be pursuing, while complaining about her relegating him to being a "friend without benefits." The email was sent in March of 2019, just months before Epstein would be indicted on charges of sex trafficking of minors and conspiracy to commit sex trafficking of minors.
Another email, flagged by historian Sam Hasselby, showed Summers' wife, Harvard English professor Elisa New, recommending that Epstein read the book Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, which is about a middle-aged professor professor who kidnaps and sexually abuses a 12-year-old girl. New described the book to Epstein as the story of "a man whose whole life is stamped forever by his impression of a young girl."
In a statement given to the Harvard Crimson, Summers called his relationship with Epstein one of the "great regrets in my life," and "a major error of judgement."
This acknowledgement was not enough to satisfy the government watchdog group Revolving Door Project, which on Thursday said Summers should lose his positions at Harvard, where he is currently a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School, and at the OpenAI Foundation, where he currently sits as a member of its board of directors.
Revolving Door Project Executive Director Jeff Hauser said that the emails showed "a close personal bond between the two men, long after Epstein’s conviction for sex crimes against minors" and added that "it is well past time for the powerful institutions that work closely with Summers—including OpenAI—to distance themselves from him, and anyone with a close relationship to Epstein."
Hauser also emphasized that Summers' years-long relationship with Epstein was not a one-time moral lapse but part of a long history of unethical behavior.
"I have previously warned about Summers’ unethical behavior and ties to unsavory businesses, but these latest revelations ought to be the final straw," he said. "It is disgusting that Summers has played such a crucial role in government at one of America's premier universities for so long. Companies and institutions affiliated with him—including the world’s most influential AI company, and two of the nation’s premier news outlets—ought to demand his immediate resignation."
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'Crisis of Elite Impunity': New Emails Show Jeffrey Epstein Scandal About More Than Just Trump
"The wealthy and powerful operate with a set of rules totally unrecognizable to the rest of us."
Nov 13, 2025
Although Democrats in the US House of Representatives have used newly unearthed emails from the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein as a cudgel against President Donald Trump, many observers have noted that the full trove of messages also implicates multiple members of the American ruling class as complicit in a criminal conspiracy.
In particular, the emails reveal that Epstein maintained friendly ties with several people with enormous influence in US politics even after he served a prison sentence for soliciting a minor.
Among the prominent elites who maintained contact with Epstein were Larry Summers, former president of Harvard University and director of the National Economic Council under President Barack Obama; right-wing billionaire Peter Thiel, whose financing helped launch Vice President JD Vance's political career; right-wing podcaster and former Trump administration official Steve Bannon; and Kathryn Ruemmler, former Obama White House counsel and current attorney for investment banking giant Goldman Sachs.
Writing on Bluesky, political scientist Ed Burmila argued that the true scandal surrounding Epstein isn't just about one person, but a "crisis of elite impunity" in which the rich and powerful will brush off the crimes committed by their peers, even if they involve the serial sexual abuse of underage girls.
"The crisis of elite impunity that is ruining our society cannot be more clearly or convincingly demonstrated than with the fact that all of these people wrote all this stuff into an email and hit send," he said. "Some of these people are lawyers; the rest are intimately (phrasing) familiar with courtrooms and lawyers in their professional lives. They didn't put this stuff in writing because they're naive or ignorant; they did it because they have no fear of consequences. None at all."
Burmila's argument was echoed by commentator David Kurtz, who wrote at Talking Points Memo that reading the Epstein emails left him "astonished not so much by the chumminess he enjoyed with elites even after he’d served time for soliciting prostitution with a minor but by their flagrantness, their casual disregard, and their indifference to consequence."
Kurtz argued that this level of ruling-class impunity symptomatic of the deep rot inside American political, legal, and academic institutions.
"It is the same impunity that got us Trump," he wrote. "Like Epstein, Trump built a career on a transactional chumminess, mutual self-indulgence, and an alarmingly high tolerance level for misbehavior by the layers of political, business, media, and cultural elites surrounding him."
Leah Greenberg, co-director of Indivisible, shared Kurtz's essay on her Bluesky account and declared the Epstein scandal "a story about total elite impunity, how the wealthy and powerful operate with a set of rules totally unrecognizable to the rest of us."
MSNBC host Chris Hayes also thought the Epstein emails showed American elites in an unflattering light, and he observed on Bluesky that many of Epstein's correspondents showered him with "fawning and flattery," even though he comes across as "a pompous, sub-literate lech."
"Lots of people say: that’s because he’s blackmailing them, but I don’t think he’s blackmailing Kathy Ruemmler!" Hayes wrote. "I don’t think that’s what explains it. I think the banal answer is: he’s very rich and powerful and good at networking and this is how people act around very rich and powerful people."
Although Epstein was only ever criminally convicted on one charge of soliciting a minor in 2008, he was subsequently indicted in 2019 on charges of engaging in a broad sex-trafficking conspiracy involving dozens of teenage girls. Epstein would die in prison before he could face trial for these charges, and law enforcement officials would subsequently claim that he took his own life.
Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein's longtime accomplice, is currently serving a 20-year prison sentence for her role in helping Epstein groom and abuse underage victims.
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'Awful News for Humanity': Alarm as Larry Summers Joins OpenAI Board
“There is no greater indication that OpenAI is unserious about the interests of humanity than their elevation of Larry Summers to its board of directors," said one watchdog.
Nov 22, 2023
News that OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman will be returning to the artificial intelligence startup just days after he was ousted by the firm's board of directors was accompanied by the announcement Tuesday of a new initial board consisting of three individuals—one of whom is the Wall Street-friendly economist and former U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers.
Given Summers' record of fighting tougher regulations for risky financial instruments and—more recently—his incorrect predictions about the trajectory and stubbornness of inflation in the U.S., his elevation to the board of a company whose AI work has profound implications for the future of humanity drew immediate alarm.
The Revolving Door Project, a progressive watchdog group whose research has uncovered Summers' deep corporate ties, called his selection to the OpenAI board "awful news for humanity."
"There is no greater indication that OpenAI is unserious about the interests of humanity than their elevation of Larry Summers to its board of directors," said Jeff Hauser, the group's executive director. "Summers energetically promotes cryptocurrency, inflation hysteria, and himself with equally misplaced ardor."
Economist and journalist Nomi Prins wrote on social media that Summers "holds the top spot of those responsible for the 2008 financial crisis," alluding to his opposition to more strictly regulating financial derivatives that fueled the economic collapse.
"If AI is to be focused on human policy and care, he's a dustbin for deregulation and recklessness," Prins argued. "As president of Harvard in 2005, Summers launched a disgusting tirade on women in math and science and seemed to believe it was based on 'research in behavioral genetics.' You want Larry to be involved with steering AI forward with human consideration?"
"Summers' ascent to the heights of AI should accelerate concerns that AI will be bad for all but the richest and most opportunistic amongst us."
OpenAI's decision to reinstate Altman as CEO under a new board consisting of Summers, former Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor, and Quora chief executive Adam D'Angelo came less than a week after the previous board removed Altman, sparking an immediate employee revolt.
The chaotic leadership shuffle at the $90 billion company was the culmination of infighting that had been building for more than a year, with some of the tensions surrounding Altman's pursuit of commercial expansion at the potential expense of safety, according to The New York Times.
"The tension got worse as OpenAI became a mainstream name thanks to its popular ChatGPT chatbot," the Times reported Tuesday. "At one point, Mr. Altman... made a move to push out one of the board's members because he thought a research paper she had co-written was critical of the company. Another member, Ilya Sutskever, thought Mr. Altman was not always being honest when talking with the board. And some board members worried that Mr. Altman was too focused on expansion while they wanted to balance that growth with AI safety."
Wired noted last week that "disagreements over the issue of prioritizing safe development of AI previously led several prominent OpenAI researchers to leave the company and found competitor Anthropic."
Earlier this year, Altman joined a number of industry leaders in signing a letter declaring that "mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war." But researchers have warned that the guardrails put in place at OpenAI are badly inadequate, particularly given the current regulatory vacuum in the U.S.
Last month, U.S. President Joe Biden signed an executive order aimed at bolstering AI safety standards, a move that watchdogs welcomed as a positive first step that must be followed by more ambitious action.
It's unclear precisely what influence Summers will have on the direction of OpenAI or artificial intelligence development more broadly.
As Bloomberg observed Wednesday, "The few comments he has made about AI have centered on the labor impact."
"In 2018, Summers disputed the claims from then-Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin that AI would not replace American jobs for 50 to 100 years," Bloomberg noted. "The robots are coming,' Summers wrote in The Washington Post. That year, he also warned of economic catastrophe if the U.S. 'loses its lead' in biotech and AI to China."
Last year, Summers told Bloomberg TV that "we are living in truly historic times" and said the AI revolution carries "opportunities and threats," adding that there's "no assurance at all" that advances in artificial intelligence will usher in progressive outcomes.
Critics suggested that with Summers involved in the management of OpenAI, the chances of guardrails operating in the public interest, as opposed to corporate profits and dominance, are worse.
"Summers' ascent to the heights of AI should accelerate concerns that AI will be bad for all but the richest and most opportunistic amongst us," said Hauser.
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