Joshua Achiam, OpenAI’s chief futurist, is leaving the company later this month after nearly nine years. According to a note to staff obtained by WIRED, Achiam told colleagues on Tuesday that the decision was not driven by one specific reason, but was something he had been considering for a while.
His departure matters because his role sat close to some of the most sensitive questions around artificial intelligence: how to weigh potential benefits, how to anticipate harms, and how to keep OpenAI’s public mission connected to its internal work.
A Departure From a Mission-Focused Role
Achiam previously led a team charged with upholding OpenAI’s nonprofit mission. In 2024, OpenAI announced a “mission alignment team” under his leadership. That group was tasked with keeping the company tied to its stated purpose as OpenAI expanded.
OpenAI disbanded the group in February and said Achiam would become chief futurist. In that position, he worked at the meeting point of AI safety and policy, studying the risks and benefits linked to artificial intelligence as the technology advanced.
OpenAI has not announced whether anyone will take over Achiam’s role. The position connected him with senior leaders, including global affairs chief Chris Lehane, as the company advocated for government regulations aligned with its mission: to ensure that AGI benefits all of humanity.
In his message to staff, Achiam framed his next chapter as a continuation of the same broad aim, rather than a break from it. He wrote, “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 also wrote, “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 Keeps Reworking Safety and Policy
Achiam’s exit comes after a period of repeated internal change. Since ChatGPT launched in 2022, OpenAI has reorganized its safety, product, and research teams numerous times. The company grew from a small research lab into a massive tech company during that period.
One focus of the last year has been narrowing the distance between AI research and policy work. OpenAI has tried to build rules and standards that anticipate where its technology is going, rather than treating policy as a separate layer that follows research later.
As research and policy teams began working more closely, several researchers became more involved in policy work. The source names Boaz Barak, Noam Brown, and Adrien Ecoffet among those who say they have taken on more policy involvement.
That shift is important because it shows a company trying to connect technical development with governance questions. It also makes leadership changes in safety-adjacent roles more visible. When a person working between research, policy, and safety leaves, the question is not only who exits, but how the structure around that work continues.
A New Strategic Futures Role Arrives
OpenAI is also adding leadership in a related area. Former White House AI adviser Dean Ball started at OpenAI this week as head of strategic futures. He will briefly overlap with Achiam.
Ball is expected to work with researchers and policy leaders in his role. That means his work will also sit near the same broad set of issues: how OpenAI studies the future direction of its technology, how it talks to policymakers, and how internal research informs outside-facing standards.
The source does not say that Ball is replacing Achiam. It says OpenAI has not yet announced if anyone will fill Achiam’s role. The overlap, however, shows that OpenAI is still investing in work that connects technical development with longer-term strategy and policy.
Part of a Wider Pattern of Safety-Focused Exits
Achiam is described as the latest safety-focused leader to leave OpenAI. His departure joins a growing list of exits as the company prepares to go public.
Jan Leike, who co-led OpenAI’s Superalignment team researching 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 left OpenAI to found nonprofits focused on AI 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.
Taken together, these exits show movement among people tied to safety, policy, dangerous capabilities, and model behavior. The source does not establish one shared cause for all of them. But it does place Achiam’s departure inside a sequence of leadership changes around the parts of OpenAI most closely associated with AI safety and governance.
Achiam’s Long Safety Record at OpenAI
Achiam joined OpenAI as an intern in 2017 and later became a research scientist focused on AI safety. Inside the company, he was known as a defender of OpenAI’s safety-focused mission. He was also controversial for occasional criticisms of the broader AI safety community.
Earlier this year, Achiam testified in federal court about an incident from 2018, when Elon Musk left OpenAI. Achiam said he interrupted Musk’s parting speech and raised concern that Musk’s plan to develop AGI at Tesla could come at the expense of safety.
Musk allegedly responded by calling Achiam a “jackass.” Dario Amodei, now the CEO of Anthropic, and David Luan, who later became the head of Amazon’s AGI lab, commemorated the moment by giving Achiam a statue of a golden donkey’s rear end. It was inscribed with the words, “Never stop being a jackass for safety.”
The episode has become part of Achiam’s public profile because it captures how directly he has been associated with safety debates inside frontier AI work. His departure does not remove those questions from OpenAI. It does make the company’s next steps on safety leadership, policy coordination, and mission alignment more important to watch.