Overview
- Sam Altman publicly invited applications for the senior safety role, calling it a “stressful” position where the hire will “jump into the deep end” immediately.
- The job carries a $555,000 base salary plus equity, placing it among the industry’s highest-compensated AI safety posts.
- Responsibilities include building capability evaluations, threat models, and scalable mitigations, with authority to raise red flags and slow or restrict releases when necessary.
- Priority risks cited by Altman include mental‑health harms and cybersecurity, with models increasingly able to identify critical software vulnerabilities, as well as tracking frontier self-improving capabilities.
- The role refills a leadership gap after Aleksander Madry moved to a different position in 2024, following departures and criticism that OpenAI’s safety focus had weakened.