Overview
- OpenAI publicly posted the senior safety role with a $555,000 salary plus equity, based in San Francisco.
- The hire will lead the company’s Preparedness framework, building capability evaluations, threat models, and mitigations for frontier risks including cybersecurity, biosecurity, and self‑improving systems.
- Sam Altman warned the position will be stressful and said the new leader will jump into the deep end immediately.
- The role fills a leadership gap after Aleksander Madry was reassigned in 2024 and successors Lilian Weng and Joaquin Quinonero Candela departed the team by mid‑2025.
- The recruiting push follows a year of legal and public scrutiny over alleged mental‑health harms linked to ChatGPT and Altman’s acknowledgment that models are beginning to find critical security vulnerabilities.