OpenAI’s chief futurist Joshua Achiam notified colleagues on Tuesday that he is leaving the company later this month after nearly nine years, WIRED has learned. Achiam, who previously led a team tasked with upholding the organization’s nonprofit mission, told OpenAI staff that his departure was not motivated by any specific reason, but was something he’s been thinking about for a while.
“The world is in on the secret now and it feels possible to work on the mission from outside the walls of a frontier lab,” Achiam said in a note to staff obtained by WIRED. “I believe we can get to a world of peace, unprecedented prosperity, and unimaginable possibilities, social and scientific. Whatever I do next, I will continue to work with you on making this vision real.”
OpenAI has not yet announced if anyone will fill Achiam’s role, which sat at the intersection of the company’s AI safety and policy teams, and involved studying the potential harms and benefits caused by the rise of artificial intelligence. Achiam worked with senior company leaders, including Global Affairs Chief Chris Lehane, to advocate for government regulations aligned with OpenAI’s mission: to ensure AGI benefits all of humanity.
OpenAI has reorganized its safety, product, and research teams numerous times since ChatGPT launched in 2022, after which the company grew rapidly from a small research lab into a massive tech company. In 2024, OpenAI announced the formation of a “mission alignment team” led by Achiam that was tasked with upholding the company’s mission. OpenAI disbanded the group in February and announced that Achiam would be taking on a new role as chief futurist.
In the last year, OpenAI has worked to bridge the gap between its AI research and policy teams as part of an effort to develop rules and standards that anticipate where its technology is headed. As the two departments began collaborating more closely, several OpenAI researchers, including Boaz Barak, Noam Brown, and Adrien Ecoffet say they have become more involved in policy work.
Former White House AI adviser Dean Ball started at OpenAI this week as the company’s head of strategic futures, and he will briefly overlap with Achiam. Ball is also expected to work with researchers and policy leaders in his role.
Achiam is the latest safety-focused leader to depart OpenAI, joining a growing list of exits as the company prepares to go public. Jan Leike, who co-led OpenAI’s Superalignment team researching how to keep advanced AI models under human control, left to join Anthropic in 2024.
That same year, head of policy research Miles Brundage and Steven Adler, who led research on dangerous capabilities of AI models, both departed OpenAI to found nonprofits that advocate for AI labs to adhere to strong safety and security standards. Andrea Vallone, who led OpenAI’s research on how ChatGPT should respond to users experiencing mental or emotional distress, left to join Leike’s team at Anthropic at the end of 2025.
After joining OpenAI as an intern in 2017, Achiam went on to become a research scientist focused on AI safety. He was known internally as a stalwart defender of OpenAI’s safety-focused mission, but was also controversial for his occasional criticisms of the broader AI safety community.
Earlier this year, he testified in federal court that he interrupted Elon Musk’s parting speech when he left OpenAI in 2018, remarking that the then-billionaire’s plan to develop AGI at Tesla could come at the expense of safety. Musk allegedly responded by calling Achiam a “jackass,” a moment that Dario Amodei (now the CEO of Anthropic) and David Luan (who went on to become the head of Amazon’s AGI lab) commemorated the moment by gifting Achiam a statue of a golden donkey’s rear-end, inscribed with the words, “Never stop being a jackass for safety.”
