OpenAI’s Chief Futurist Is Leaving the Company

General manager of OpenAI Joshua Achiam informed his colleagues on Tuesday that he is leaving the company at the end of this month after nearly nine years, WIRED has learned. Achiam, who previously headed the team that oversees the organization’s operations non-profit activitieshe told the OpenAI staff that his departure was not due to specific reasons, but it was something he had been thinking about for a long time.

“The world is now private and it seems possible to do the work from outside the walls of the lab,” Achiam said in a letter to staff obtained by WIRED. “I believe we can reach a world of peace, unprecedented prosperity, and unparalleled opportunities, culturally and scientifically. Whatever I do, I will continue to work with you to make this vision a reality.”

OpenAI has not yet announced whether there will be anyone to fill the role of Achiam, who has sat on the forefront of the company’s AI security teams and policies, and has taken an active role in studying the potential harms of the rise of artificial intelligence. Achiam has worked with key industry leaders, including the Global Affairs Chief Chris Lehaneadvocating for government legislation consistent with OpenAI’s mission: to ensure that AGI benefits all people.

OpenAI has revamped its security, sales, and research teams more time since ChatGPT was founded in 2022, the company has since grown rapidly from a small research laboratory into a large technology company. In 2024, OpenAI announced the creation of a “mission management team” led by Achiam tasked with achieving the company’s mission. OpenAI he dissolved the group in February and announced that Achiam would take on a new role as the next CEO.

Over the past year, OpenAI has been working to bridge the gap between its AI research groups and policy as part of an effort to create rules and policies that focus on where its technology is headed. As the two departments began to collaborate more closely, several OpenAI researchers, including Boaz Barak, Noam Brown, and Adrien Ecoffet are said to have been involved in many of the policy projects.

Former White House AI advisor Dean Ball he started at OpenAI this week as the company’s future topic, and will be briefly joined by Achiam. Mpira is also expected to work with researchers and political leaders in his role.

Achiam is the latest security leader to leave OpenAI, joining a growing list of exits as a company. they are planning to go public. Jan Leike, who led OpenAI’s Superalignment team researching how to keep advanced AI models under human control, has left to join Anthropic in 2024.

In the same year, the director of policy research Miles Brundage and Steven Adler, who led the research on the risks of AI models, both left OpenAI to found a non-profit that encourages AI labs to follow strict principles of safety and security. Andrea Vallonewho led OpenAI’s research into how ChatGPT should respond users suffering from mental or emotional problemsleft to join Leike’s team at Anthropic in late 2025.

After joining OpenAI as a student in 2017, Achiam became a research scientist focusing on AI security. He is known internally as a staunch defender of the OpenAI security research project, but he has also been opposed to it. occasional criticism AI security team.

Earlier this year, he testified in federal court that he interrupted Elon Musk’s parting speech after he left OpenAI in 2018, saying that Tesla’s then-billion-dollar plan to develop AGI could come down to safety concerns. Musk reportedly responded by calling Achiam a “jackass,” a moment that Dario Amodei (now CEO of Anthropic) and David Luan (who became the head of Amazon’s AGI lab) recalled the moment in a gift. Achiam statue on the back of a golden donkeyinscribed with the words, “Don’t stop being a wolf to be safe.”