OpenAI’s Chief Futurist Departs the Company

OpenAI’s chief futurist, Joshua Achiam, announced to colleagues on Tuesday that he will leave the company later this month after nearly nine years, according to information obtained by WIRED. Achiam, who previously led a team focused on preserving the organization’s nonprofit mission, told OpenAI staff that his decision was not driven by any single event, but rather something he had been contemplating for some time.

“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 wrote in a staff note seen 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 disclosed whether anyone will assume Achiam’s role, which bridged the company’s AI safety and policy teams, and involved analyzing both the potential harms and benefits stemming from the rise of artificial intelligence. In that capacity, he collaborated with senior leaders, including global affairs chief Chris Lehane, to advocate for government regulations aligned with OpenAI’s core mission: ensuring that AGI benefits all of humanity.

Since ChatGPT’s launch in 2022, OpenAI has undergone multiple restructurings of its safety, product, and research teams, evolving rapidly from a small research lab into a massive tech company. In 2024, OpenAI established a “mission alignment team” led by Achiam, tasked with upholding the company’s mission. That group was disbanded in February, and Achiam was reassigned to a new position as chief futurist.

Over the past year, OpenAI has worked to close 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 heading. As these two departments began collaborating more closely, several OpenAI researchers,including Boaz Barak, Noam Brown, and Adrien Ecoffet,have said they are becoming more involved in policy work.

Former White House AI adviser Dean Ball joined 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 new role.

Achiam is the latest safety-focused leader to leave OpenAI, joining a growing list of departures as the company prepares to go public. Jan Leike, who co-led OpenAI’s Superalignment team,which researched 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.

Achiam joined OpenAI as an intern in 2017 and later became a research scientist focused on AI safety. He was known internally as a steadfast defender of OpenAI’s safety-focused mission, but also sparked controversy with his occasional criticisms of the broader AI safety community.

Earlier this year, he testified in federal court that he interrupted Elon Musk’s farewell speech when Musk left OpenAI in 2018, remarking that the 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 CEO of Anthropic) and David Luan (who later became head of Amazon’s AGI lab) commemorated by gifting Achiam a statue of a golden donkey’s rear end, inscribed with the words, “Never stop being a jackass for safety.”