OpenAI’s main Futurist, Joshua Achiam announced to his 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 supporting the nonprofit’s mission, told OpenAI staff that his departure was not motivated by any particular reason, but something he had been thinking about for a long time.
“The world is now in the dark and feels unable to work on this mission outside the walls of the frontier lab,” Achiam wrote to the staff obtained by WIRED. “I believe we can reach a world of peace, unprecedented prosperity, and unimaginable opportunities, social and scientific. Whatever I do next, I will continue to work with you in making this vision a reality.”
OpenAI has yet to announce whether anyone will fill Achiam’s role, which sits at the intersection of the company’s AI security and policy teams, and is involved in studying the potential risks and benefits of the rise of artificial intelligence. Achiam worked with senior corporate leaders, including global affairs manager Chris Lehane, to advocate for government regulations that align with OpenAI’s mission: to ensure that AGI benefits all of humanity.
OpenAI has reorganized its security, product, and research teams several times since the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, after which the company quickly grew from a small research lab to a large technology company. In 2024, OpenAI announced the creation of a “machine alignment team” led by Achiam tasked with supporting the company’s mission. OpenAI disbanded the team in February and announced that Achiam would take on a new role as head of the future.
Over the past year, OpenAI has worked to bridge the gap between its AI research groups and policy as part of an effort to improve the rules and standards it expects its technology to lead to. As the two departments began to work closely together, several OpenAI researchers, including Boaz Barak, Noam Brown, and Adrien Ecoffet said 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’ll add a bit to Achiam as well. Ball is expected to work with researchers and policy leaders in his role.
Achiam is the latest security-focused leader to depart OpenAI, joining a growing list of exits as the company prepares to go public. Jan Leike, who collaborated with 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 head of policy research Miles Brundage and Steven Adler, who were leading research on the dangerous capabilities of AI models, both left OpenAI to found non-profit organizations that advocate for AI labs to adhere to strict safety and security standards. Andrea Vallone, who led OpenAI’s research on how ChatGPT should respond to users facing mental or emotional stress, has 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 focusing on AI security. Internally he was known as a staunch defender of the security-focused OpenAI project, but he was also controversial for his criticism of the broader AI security community.
Earlier this year, he testified in federal court that he interrupted Elon Musk’s parting speech when he left OpenAI in 2018, saying the billionaire’s plan to develop AGI at Tesla could come at the cost of security. Musk reportedly responded by calling Achiam a “horse,” a moment that Dario Amodei (now CEO of Anthropic) and David Luan (who went on to become head of Amazon’s AGI lab) commemorated by presenting Achiam with a gold donkey back, emblazoned with the words, “Never stop being a security jack.”
