OpenAI Chief Futurist Joshua Achiam Announces Departure After 9 Years

Just now, OpenAI’s Chief Futurist, Joshua Achiam, announced his departure on X.

This is not a routine staff change.

Within OpenAI, the Chief Futurist role sits at the intersection of AI safety, policy, and the company’s mission, responsible for studying the risks and opportunities that may arise as AI continues to grow stronger.

Joshua Achiam is one of the key figures on OpenAI’s safety and mission team.

In 2017, nine years ago, he joined OpenAI as an intern. Early on, he was a research scientist focused on AI safety, conducting research on safety constraints in deep reinforcement learning.

Later, he led OpenAI’s Mission Alignment team, responsible for upholding the company’s original mission:

Ensure that AGI benefits all of humanity.

In February this year, OpenAI disbanded the Mission Alignment team, and Joshua transitioned to the role of Chief Futurist at the company.

However, just five months later, Joshua announced that he would officially leave the company after nine years on July 24.

As for the reason for his departure, Joshua did not disclose much.

He simply stated that his departure was not due to any specific event or a sudden impulse, but rather the result of long-term consideration.

In a long post on X, Joshua referred to this departure as "graduation."

He wrote that he joined OpenAI in 2017 as a 25-year-old intern, fresh out of UC Berkeley. At that time, computers could not truly converse with humans or think.

Now, at 34, he is a father to a 2-year-old, and computers have begun solving cutting-edge scientific problems.

Joshua described these nine years as "a decade that experienced changes equivalent to several centuries."

He remains optimistic about the future.

I believe we can create a world where “meeting everyone’s basic needs” is no longer a problem to be solved—but instead, we’ll find it shameful that we ever set the bar so low. I believe we can achieve a world filled with peace, unprecedented prosperity, and countless unimaginable social and scientific possibilities. No matter what I do next, I will continue working alongside you to make this vision a reality.

Finally, he concluded with a single sentence:

To safeguard AGI.

This also resembles his position at OpenAI over the past nine years.

According to WIRED, OpenAI has not yet announced who will succeed Joshua’s position. This role sits at the intersection of the company’s AI safety and policy teams and involves researching the potential risks and benefits arising from the rise of AI.

Previously, Joshua also collaborated with senior leaders such as Chris Lehane, Head of Global Affairs at OpenAI, to advance government regulations aligned with OpenAI’s mission.

In other words, he is not merely a "futurist" who makes predictions.

More precisely, what he did inside OpenAI was something else: as the model's capabilities advanced rapidly, he continually reminded the company of that old question.

Where exactly does this road ultimately lead?

Looking back at Joshua's career at OpenAI, the most dramatic moment occurred in 2018.

In April-May this year, during the global trial between Musk and OpenAI, Joshua testified, recalling Musk’s farewell speech in 2018 before leaving OpenAI:

At the time, he interrupted Musk, pointing out that developing AGI at Tesla could come at the cost of safety.

It was claimed that Musk immediately yelled: "Joshua is a jackass."

Later, the incident became an internal "urban legend" at OpenAI.

Dario Amodei, now CEO of Anthropic, and David Luan, who later became head of Amazon’s AGI lab, presented Achiam with a golden trophy engraved with the following message:

For security, never stop being that jackass.

On Reddit, a user quickly added this incident to OpenAI’s list of departing safety leads.

Someone joked:

Ilya left, Jan left, and now Joshua has left too. Every time the person responsible for alignment leaves, something seems to happen at OpenAI.

This meme certainly has an element of exaggeration.

But over the past two years, there have been significant changes to OpenAI's safety line.

The netizen mentioned Jan is Jan Leike, who co-led OpenAI’s Superalignment team, researching how to keep advanced AI models aligned with human control. In 2024, he left OpenAI to join Anthropic.

That same year, Miles Brundage, Head of Policy Research at OpenAI, and Steven Adler, who previously led research on dangerous capabilities of AI models, also departed to found nonprofit organizations aimed at encouraging AI labs to adopt stricter safety and security standards.

Andrea Vallone previously researched how ChatGPT responds to users experiencing psychological or emotional distress. She left OpenAI at the end of 2025 to join Company A, the team where her former colleague Jan Leike works.

Joshua is the most recent name on this departure chain.

Meanwhile, OpenAI is also adjusting the relationship between safety, research, and policy.

WIRED noted that over the past year, OpenAI has been working to bridge the gap between its AI research team and its policy team, aiming to develop rules and standards that better anticipate the direction of technological advancement. Researchers including Boaz Barak, Noam Brown, and Adrien Ecoffet have also become more involved in policy-related work.

On the other hand, former White House AI advisor Dean Ball joined OpenAI this week as Head of Strategic Futures. He will have a brief handover with Joshua and is expected to continue collaborating with researchers and policy leads.

This makes Joshua's departure seem more subtle.

On one hand, OpenAI is increasingly tying “safety” and “policy” together; on the other hand, the individual who previously led Mission Alignment and later became Chief Futurist has chosen to leave the lab at this juncture.

Joshua wrote in his resignation letter: "The world now knows this secret (achieving AGI). It is now possible to continue advancing this mission beyond the walls of Frontier Lab."

This may be the most thought-provoking statement in the entire matter.

Over the past decade, the pace of AI development has indeed been exhilarating. OpenAI is no longer just a small research lab; it has transformed into a new kind of institution grappling with products, capital, policy, courts, and the public.

But ultimately, the past decade has merely been a small part of AI’s journey—the road ahead may be even longer.

Long enough to wear down any Goliath into a dwarf.

Reference link

[1]https://x.com/jachiam0/status/2074605703281693175

[2] https://www.wired.com/story/openai-chief-futurist-joshua-achiam-is-leaving-the-company/

This article is from the WeChat public account "Quantum Bit," authored by Henry.