ChatGPT’s new boss in town: OpenAI poaches Uber India chief to run its biggest battleground market

MUMBAI: OpenAI has gone shopping in Uber’s backyard, and it has come away with the prize catch. The Sam Altman-run firm has named prabhjeet Singh, until Friday the president of Uber India and South Asia, as its first managing director for India. The move lands as OpenAI simultaneously ships GPT-5.6 Sol, a model it is billing as carrying its toughest safety armour yet, in what amounts to a one-two punch: charm the world’s second-largest ChatGPT market while clamping down hard on misuse everywhere else.

Singh will officially take the wheel in September, becoming OpenAI’s most senior executive on Indian soil. He reports to Kiran Mani, OpenAI’s managing director for Asia-Pacific, a former Google executive who has run Android and Google Play across the region for over 13 years. Singh’s own brief is sprawling: consumer growth, enterprise adoption, partnerships, regulatory engagement and day-to-day operations, all rolled into one job description meaty enough to make most executives blink.

It caps an 11-year run at Uber for Singh, who joined the ride-hailing giant in 2015 as head of strategy after a near-decade stint at McKinsey, and rose to run Uber’s India and South Asia mobility business from 2020. An alumnus of IIT Kharagpur and IIM Ahmedabad, he steered Uber through electric-mobility pushes and integrations with India’s digital public infrastructure, exactly the regulatory tightrope-walking OpenAI now needs someone to manage on its behalf. Uber, for its part, was gracious in defeat, thanking Singh for his “leadership and lasting contributions” and insisting India remains one of its most important markets globally.

For OpenAI, the hire is less a vanity signing than a necessity. India is ChatGPT’s second-biggest market after the United States, with more than 100 million weekly users and a young, hyper-engaged base already leaning hard on coding tools like Codex. The company opened its first Indian office in New Delhi last year, has partnerships with the likes of Tata, JioHotstar, PhonePe, CRED and MakeMyTrip already inked, and plans fresh offices in Mumbai and Bengaluru before the year is out. What it lacked was someone to actually run the P&L. Singh fits that gap neatly, joining a local leadership bench that already includes Pragya Misra on strategy and global affairs, with former Twitter India head Rishi Jaitly advising on government engagement.

The timing is no accident, either. OpenAI’s rivals are racing for the same turf: Anthropic installed former Microsoft India head Irina Ghose to run its Indian operations back in January and opened a Bengaluru office the following month. With over a billion internet users and a developer community to match, India has become the AI industry’s hottest proving ground, and nobody wants to arrive second.

The leadership coup wasn’t OpenAI’s only news on Friday. The company also pushed out GPT-5.6 Sol, its latest model, built around what it calls real-time protections against high-risk cyber activity and repeated misuse. OpenAI said the system was hardened over weeks of human red-teaming and more than 700,000 A100-equivalent GPU hours of automated testing, with the new safeguards switched on by default. The upgrade follows GPT-5’s early-2026 debut, which delivered major reasoning and coding gains, with subsequent point releases tightening reliability and guardrails as frontier labs come under mounting pressure to prove their models can be deployed safely at scale, rather than just impressively.

Put the two announcements together and the message is unmistakable: OpenAI wants deeper roots in India and a tighter leash on misuse everywhere else, and it is not waiting around to get either.