Larry Summers, Former United States Secretary of the Treasury, attends the annual Allen and Co. Sun Valley Media Conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, U.S., July 8, 2022. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid

By Deborah Mary Sophia

(Reuters) -Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers has resigned from the OpenAI board, he said on Wednesday, several days after Congress released documents that showed Summers shared a close relationship with the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Summers, also a former president of Harvard University, said on Monday he would step back from all public commitments, adding that the move was to allow him "to rebuild trust and repair relationships with the people closest to me."

Summers has been under fire after the U.S. House Oversight Committee released documents detailing an ongoing correspondence between Summers and Epstein. Harvard University, where Summers is still a professor, will open a new probe into individuals included in the Epstein emails, a university spokesperson said on Wednesday, without specifically naming Summers.

"Larry has decided to resign from the OpenAI Board of Directors, and we respect his decision. We appreciate his many contributions and the perspective he brought to the Board," OpenAI 's board of directors said in a statement.

The move, first reported by Axios, comes one day after the Republican-controlled U.S. Congress voted almost unanimously to force the release of DOJ files on Epstein, an outcome President Donald Trump had fought for months before ending his opposition.

Trump in recent days ordered the U.S. Justice Department to investigate his and other prominent Democrats' ties to Epstein, as he has tried to shift focus away from his own relationship with the convicted sex offender. Trump has said he had no connection to Epstein's crimes.

The Epstein scandal has been a political thorn in Trump’s side for months, partly because he amplified conspiracy theories about Epstein to his own supporters. It was one of the reasons cited for the decline in his approval ratings, which fell to a new low of 38% in Reuters/Ipsos polling this week. Just 20% of Americans approve of how Trump has handled the issue.

Many Trump voters believe his administration has covered up Epstein's ties to powerful figures and obscured details surrounding his death in a Manhattan jail in 2019, which was ruled a suicide.

Summers, a Democrat, served as former President Bill Clinton's Treasury Secretary and former President Barack Obama's National Economic Council director.

He has served on the OpenAI board since late 2023, following the brief ouster of the ChatGPT maker's CEO Sam Altman.

Other prominent companies with ties to Summers include edu-tech firm Skillsoft, where he has been a board member since 2021, and Santander, where he chairs the bank's international advisory board.

(Reporting by Deborah Sophia in Bengaluru; Editing by Shilpi Majumdar and Anil D'Silva)