Larry Summers going on leave at Harvard, resigns from OpenAI board after Epstein emails

Larry Summers announced he is resigning from OpenAI's board of directors, days after he said he was stepping back from public commitments.

Larry Summers announced Wednesday night that he would step aside from his teaching duties at Harvard University while the school investigates his ties to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Summers, a former treasury secretary and ex-president of Harvard, also plans to go on leave as director of the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at the Harvard Kennedy School, according to his spokesman, Steven Goldberg.

"His co-teachers will complete the remaining three class sessions of the courses he has been teaching with them this semester, and he is not scheduled to teach next semester," Goldberg told NBC News in a statement.

Summers has been in the national spotlight after the House Oversight Committee published more than 20,000 documents from Epstein's estate, including extensive email exchanges between the two men suggesting they were closer than had previously been known.

Harvard plans to investigate the links between university faculty members and the disgraced financier, a spokesman for the school confirmed to the campus newspaper earlier Wednesday.