OpenAI’s Chief Futurist Is Leaving the Company
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- Joshua Achiam notified OpenAI staff Tuesday that he's leaving later this month after nearly nine years, having joined as an intern in 2017 and previously led a team upholding the company's nonprofit mission before becoming chief futurist in February
- Achiam told colleagues his exit wasn't tied to any specific grievance, adding 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," signaling he plans to continue AI safety work externally
- His chief futurist role sat at the intersection of OpenAI's AI safety and policy teams and will not be immediately backfilled; former White House AI adviser Dean Ball started this week as head of strategic futures and will briefly overlap with Achiam
- Achiam's exit continues a broader safety-team exodus: Jan Leike left for Anthropic in 2024, Miles Brundage and Steven Adler departed that same year to co-found safety advocacy nonprofits, and Andrea Vallone joined Anthropic at the end of 2025
- Earlier this year, Achiam testified in federal court that he interrupted Elon Musk's 2018 parting speech to criticize Musk's plan to develop AGI at Tesla; Musk allegedly called him a "jackass," prompting then-colleagues Dario Amodei (now Anthropic CEO) and David Luan to gift him a golden donkey statue inscribed "Never stop being a jackass for safety"
Why it matters: Achiam is the fifth safety-focused leader to exit OpenAI since 2024, with at least two of them—Jan Leike and Andrea Vallone—going directly to rival Anthropic, as the company prepares to go public. Achiam's own framing that the mission is now workable "from outside the walls of a frontier lab" signals a view among OpenAI's safety staff that independent or competitor work may be more sustainable than remaining inside an IPO-bound company scaling rapidly.
