Joshua Achiam, OpenAI's Chief Futurist, Is Leaving
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- Joshua Achiam notified OpenAI staff on Tuesday he's leaving later this month after nearly nine years, writing that "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."
- OpenAI disbanded the mission alignment team Achiam led in February, moved him into the new chief futurist role bridging safety and policy, and has not announced a replacement as the company prepares to go public.
- Anthropic has absorbed multiple OpenAI safety leaders during this period — Jan Leike joined in 2024, and Andrea Vallone joined Leike's team at the end of 2025; Miles Brundage and Steven Adler also departed in 2024 to found safety-focused nonprofits.
- Dean Ball, a former White House AI adviser, joined OpenAI this week as head of strategic futures and will briefly overlap with Achiam.
- In federal court testimony, Achiam recounted interrupting Elon Musk's 2018 departure speech to warn his Tesla AGI plans could come "at the expense of safety"; Musk allegedly called him a "jackass," prompting Dario Amodei and David Luan to gift him a golden donkey statue inscribed "Never stop being a jackass for safety."
Why it matters: Achiam's exit continues OpenAI's steady safety-leadership drain — Leike, Vallone, Brundage, and Adler all departed in 2024-2025 — right as the company files to go public with the futurist role unfilled. The position was OpenAI's main bridge between its safety researchers and its policy team.
