Joshua Achiam, the chief futurist at OpenAI, has formally notified his colleagues of his decision to leave the company later this month. His departure marks the end of a significant nearly nine-year tenure at the organization. Achiam, who previously spearheaded the team responsible for upholding the company’s nonprofit mission, explained to OpenAI staff that his exit is not tied to any single precipitating event, but rather a reflection he has been considering for some time.
The Mission and Future Horizons
In a farewell note to his team obtained by sources, Achiam shared that the world is now well aware of the developments in AI, and it feels entirely possible to continue working toward the mission from outside the confines of a frontier laboratory. He expressed a strong belief that the world can achieve a future defined by peace, unprecedented prosperity, and vast, unimaginable social and scientific possibilities. He further reassured his colleagues that regardless of his next professional chapter, he intends to remain committed to working with them to ensure this vision becomes a reality.
Role and Organizational Shifts
OpenAI has yet to name a successor for Achiam, whose position sat at the critical intersection of the firm's AI safety and policy divisions. His work involved rigorously studying the potential benefits and risks stemming from the rapid proliferation of artificial intelligence. Achiam worked closely with high-level leaders, including Global Affairs Chief Chris Lehane, to lobby for government regulations that align with OpenAI’s founding goal of ensuring that AGI benefits all of humanity.
Since the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, OpenAI has undergone numerous reorganizations involving its safety, product, and research divisions as the firm scaled from a compact research lab into a massive global technology player. In 2024, the company launched a mission alignment team headed by Achiam, tasked with ensuring the firm stayed true to its mission. That specific unit was disbanded in February, at which point Achiam transitioned into the role of chief futurist.
Aligning Research and Policy
Over the past year, OpenAI has been working to bridge the gap between its technical AI research teams and its policy experts, aiming to develop standards that anticipate where its technology is headed. As these two departments have increased their collaboration, several researchers, such as Boaz Barak, Noam Brown, and Adrien Ecoffet, have become significantly more involved in policy-driven initiatives. Furthermore, Dean Ball, a former White House AI adviser, joined OpenAI this week as the head of strategic futures and will have a brief overlap with Achiam’s final days at the firm.
A Pattern of Departures
Achiam is only the latest in a series of safety-focused leaders to exit OpenAI as the firm gears up to potentially go public. In 2024, Jan Leike, a co-leader of OpenAI’s Superalignment team dedicated to maintaining human control over advanced models, departed to join Anthropic. That same year, policy research head Miles Brundage and Steven Adler, who led the research into the dangerous capabilities of AI models, also left to establish nonprofit organizations that advocate for strict safety standards within AI laboratories. Additionally, Andrea Vallone, who managed research on how ChatGPT interacts with users in emotional or mental distress, left at the end of 2025 to join Leike’s team at Anthropic.
Origins and Internal History
Achiam joined OpenAI as an intern in 2017 before rising to become a research scientist specializing in AI safety. Internally, he was regarded as a staunch defender of the company’s safety-oriented mission, though he also drew some controversy for occasional critiques of the broader AI safety community. Earlier this year, he provided testimony in federal court regarding an incident in 2018 where he interrupted Elon Musk’s parting speech. Achiam noted at the time that Musk’s ambition to develop AGI at Tesla could potentially jeopardize safety standards. Musk reportedly responded by calling Achiam a jackass. To commemorate the moment, Dario Amodei—now the CEO of Anthropic—and David Luan, who later headed Amazon’s AGI lab, gifted Achiam a golden statue of a donkey’s rear-end inscribed with the phrase: Never stop being a jackass for safety.
