Chief futurist of OpenAI Joshua Achiam notified colleagues 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 employees that his departure was not motivated by any specific reason but was something he had been thinking about for some time.
“The world now knows the secret and it appears that it is possible to work on the mission from outside the walls of the border laboratory,” Achiam said in a memo to staff obtained by WIRED. “I believe we can achieve a world of peace, unprecedented prosperity, and unimaginable social and scientific opportunities. Whatever I do next, I will continue to work with you to make this vision a reality.”
OpenAI has not yet announced whether anyone will take over Achiam’s position, which served as the interface between the company’s security and AI policy teams and included research into the potential harms and benefits caused by the development of AI. Achiam worked with the company’s senior leaders, including global chief executive Chris Lehane, to advocate for government regulations aligned with OpenAI’s mission: ensuring that AGI benefits all of humanity.
Since the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, OpenAI has repeatedly reorganized its security, product and research teams, and the company has quickly transformed itself from a compact research lab into a massive technology company. In 2024, OpenAI announced the formation of a “mission setting team” led by Achiam to uphold the company’s mission. OpenAI disbanded the group in February and announced that Achiam would take on a fresh role as chief futurist.
Over the past year, OpenAI has worked to bridge the gap between its artificial intelligence research and policy teams as part of an effort to develop policies and standards that predict 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, say they have become more involved in policy work.
Former White House Artificial Intelligence Advisor Dean Ball he started at OpenAI this week as the company’s head of strategic future and will work with Achiam for a brief time. Ball is also expected to collaborate with researchers and policy leaders in his role.
Achiam is the latest security-focused leader to leave OpenAI, joining a growing list of exits as the company prepares to go public. Jan Leike, who co-led the Superalignment team at OpenAI exploring how to keep advanced AI models under human control, has left to join Anthropic in 2024.
That same year, policy research chiefs Miles Brundage and Steven Adler, who led research into the perilous capabilities of AI models, left OpenAI to found nonprofits that advocate for AI labs to adhere to demanding safety standards. Andrea Vallone, who led OpenAI’s research into how ChatGPT should respond to users experiencing mental or emotional stress, left and joined Leike’s team at Anthropic in behind schedule 2025.
After joining OpenAI as an intern in 2017, Achiam became a research fellow focusing on AI security. Internally, he was known as a steadfast defender of OpenAI’s security-focused mission, but he was also controversial for his occasional criticisms the broader AI security community.
Earlier this year, he testified in federal court that he interrupted Elon Musk’s farewell speech as he left OpenAI in 2018, noting that the then-billionaire’s plan to develop AGI at Tesla might come at the expense of safety. Musk allegedly called Achiam an “ass” in response. Dario Amodei (now CEO of Anthropic) and David Luan (later head of Amazon’s AGI lab) commemorated the moment by giving Achiam a statue of the back of a golden donkey with the words “Never Stop Being an Asshole for Safety.”