Exclusive: OpenAI disbanded its mission alignment team
Joshua Achiam will become the company's chief futurist
This is a column about AI. My boyfriend works at Anthropic. See my full ethics disclosure here.
OpenAI disbanded its mission alignment team in recent weeks and transferred its seven employees to other teams, Platformer has learned. Joshua Achiam, who led the team, will take on a new title as OpenAI's "chief futurist."
The mission alignment team was created in 2024 to promote the company's stated mission to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced that Achiam would lead the new team on September 25 of that year. The announcement came the same day that then-chief technical officer Mira Murati announced her surprise departure from OpenAI, along with two key researchers. (One of those researchers, Barret Zoph, recently returned to the company.)
