Joshua Achiam, OpenAI's chief futurist and a long-standing safety advocate, is leaving the company later this month after nearly nine years. His departure marks another exit by a safety-focused leader from OpenAI as the company prepares to go public, continuing a broader trend of AI safety researchers departing the organization over the past two years.
Summaries like this, in your inbox every morning.
Sign up free →What happened
Joshua Achiam, OpenAI's chief futurist who led the company's mission alignment work on AI safety and policy, notified colleagues on Tuesday that he is leaving later this month after nearly nine years with the organization. Achiam stated his departure was not motivated by a specific reason but something he had been thinking about for a while, and that he believes the mission can be pursued from outside OpenAI.
Why it matters
Achiam's exit continues a pattern of departures by safety-focused leaders from OpenAI, including Jan Leike (who joined Anthropic in 2024), Miles Brundage and Steven Adler (who founded nonprofits focused on AI safety standards), and Andrea Vallone (who joined Anthropic at the end of 2025). His role sat at the intersection of OpenAI's AI safety and policy teams, tasked with studying potential harms and benefits of AI technology and advocating for government regulations aligned with the company's mission.
What to watch
Former White House AI adviser Dean Ball started at OpenAI this week as the company's head of strategic futures and will briefly overlap with Achiam before his departure. OpenAI has not yet announced whether anyone will fill Achiam's role or how his responsibilities will be distributed.
Joshua Achiam's departure reflects ongoing turbulence within OpenAI's safety and policy functions at a time when the company is preparing to go public. Since ChatGPT's launch in 2022, OpenAI has reorganized its safety, product, and research teams numerous times as the organization grew from a small research lab into a massive tech company. In 2024, OpenAI created the mission alignment team specifically led by Achiam to uphold the company's nonprofit mission, only to disband the group in February and reassign Achiam as chief futurist. His exit comes as part of a broader pattern: the company has lost several prominent safety researchers over the past two years, including Jan Leike to Anthropic, Miles Brundage and Steven Adler to independent nonprofits, and Andrea Vallone to Anthropic.
Achiam's decision to leave, combined with his statement that the mission can be advanced from outside OpenAI, suggests a shift in how safety and policy work may be conducted within the organization. The arrival of Dean Ball, a former White House AI adviser now serving as head of strategic futures, indicates OpenAI is attempting to fill this expertise gap. However, the company has not yet announced how Achiam's responsibilities will be distributed or whether the chief futurist role itself will be filled. This uncertainty, paired with the pattern of departures, may signal internal tensions between the company's original safety-focused mission and the pressures of rapid commercialization as it moves toward a public offering.
No comments yet. Be the first to share your thoughts!
Log in to join the discussion
Get curated AI news from 200+ sources delivered daily to your inbox. Free to use.
Get Started FreeFree · takes 30 seconds · unsubscribe anytime
1 minute a day. The AI essentials.
200+ sources · Email / LINE / Slack
