OpenAI’s chief futurist, Joshua Achiam, told colleagues on Tuesday that he’s leaving the company later this month after nearly nine years, according to Wired AI. Achiam broke the news in an internal note obtained by Wired AI, saying there was no single reason behind the move, just something he’d been weighing 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,” he wrote.
He joined as an intern in 2017 and rose to become one of OpenAI’s most visible safety voices. His exit matters because of where he sat and who’s leaving alongside him.
Who Achiam was inside OpenAI
Achiam’s role lived at the crossroads of AI safety and policy. He studied the potential harms and benefits of advanced AI, and he worked with senior leaders like global affairs chief Chris Lehane to push for regulation aligned with OpenAI’s stated mission: making sure AGI benefits all of humanity.
His path tracked the company’s own churn. In 2024, OpenAI created a “mission alignment team” led by Achiam to defend that mission. The company disbanded the group in February and moved him into the chief futurist job. According to Wired AI, OpenAI hasn’t said whether anyone will fill the role now that he’s out.
Part of a bigger pattern
What stands out here is that Achiam isn’t an outlier. He’s the latest safety-focused leader to walk as OpenAI prepares to go public. The recent departures pile up fast:
- Jan Leike, co-lead of the Superalignment team, left for Anthropic in 2024.
- Miles Brundage, head of policy research, departed the same year to start a nonprofit.
- Steven Adler, who led work on dangerous AI capabilities, also left in 2024 to found a safety-focused nonprofit.
- Andrea Vallone, who researched how ChatGPT should respond to users in emotional distress, joined Leike’s Anthropic team at the end of 2025.
That’s a steady drain of the people whose job was to ask hard questions about where the technology is headed. When a company is racing toward an IPO, the exit of its safety and mission voices is worth watching closely.
The reorg behind the moves
This is significant because OpenAI has spent the past year trying to stitch its research and policy teams together. The goal, per Wired AI, is to write rules and standards that anticipate where the tech is going rather than react after the fact. As the two sides worked closer, researchers including Boaz Barak, Noam Brown, and Adrien Ecoffet got pulled deeper into policy work.
There’s already a replacement of sorts in the building. Dean Ball, a former White House AI adviser, started this week as OpenAI’s head of strategic futures and will briefly overlap with Achiam before he’s gone. Ball is expected to work with both researchers and policy leaders, which suggests OpenAI wants that research-meets-policy bridge to hold even as familiar faces leave.
The golden donkey story
Achiam was a true believer in OpenAI’s safety mission, though he wasn’t shy about criticizing the broader AI safety crowd either. The best illustration comes from federal court testimony earlier this year. Achiam said he interrupted Elon Musk’s farewell speech when Musk left OpenAI in 2018, warning that Musk’s plan to build AGI at Tesla could come at the cost of safety. Musk allegedly shot back by calling him a “jackass.”
Dario Amodei, now Anthropic’s CEO, and David Luan, now head of Amazon’s AGI lab, marked the moment by gifting Achiam a statue of a golden donkey’s rear end. The inscription read: “Never stop being a jackass for safety.”
What to watch next
The open question is whether OpenAI backfills the futurist role at all, or folds those responsibilities into the new strategic futures team under Ball. Either way, the internal center of gravity keeps shifting from independent safety advocacy toward policy that moves in step with the product. For anyone tracking how frontier labs govern themselves ahead of an IPO, that shift is the story to keep an eye on. You can find the full account at the original source.