Thomas Dohmke, CEO of Microsoft Corp.-owned GitHub, said on Monday he’s stepping down and will leave the company at the end of 2025 to become “a founder again,” signaling a major shakeup in how the artificial intelligence (AI) coding unit is run.

Since Microsoft acquired GitHub in 2018 for $7.5 billion, it has operated as an independent unit. But the exit of Dohmke, who was CEO for nearly four years, marks a major turning point in the way GitHub operates. Microsoft isn’t naming a new CEO position, and the rest of GitHub’s leadership team will report directly to Microsoft’s new CoreAI engineering team.

“GitHub and its leadership team will continue its mission as part of Microsoft’s CoreAI organization, with more details shared soon,” Dohmke wrote in a blog post Monday. “I’ll be staying through the end of 2025 to help guide the transition and am leaving with a deep sense of pride in everything we’ve built as a remote-first organization spread around the world.”

The move, amid growing competition from Alphabet Inc.’s Google and startup Cursor, underscores the increasingly high stakes in creating AI tools for programmers.

For several years, there have been signs that Microsoft intended to embrace GitHub more tightly. In 2021, GitHub’s reporting structure changed when former CEO Nat Friedman stepped down and his replacement, Dohmke, reported to Julia Liuson, head of Microsoft’s developer division. Earlier this year, Liuson began reporting to Jay Parikh, a former Meta Platforms Inc. executive who leads CoreAI.

CoreAI encompasses Microsoft’s platform and tools division and Dev Div teams. It is tasked with building an AI platform, as well as tools for Microsoft and its customers.

“While a change in GitHub leadership was going to happen sooner or later, so too is the stronger integration of GitHub with Microsoft,” Mitch Ashley, vice president and practice lead, software lifecycle engineering at Futurum Group, said in an email. “Bringing GitHub to work as part of the CoreAI organization is essential to fully execute AI strategies in such an innovation-rich marketplace. Microsoft must continue fostering GitHub’s open developer culture and community that is vital to the combined success of Microsoft and GitHub.”