As artificial intelligence models grow more powerful, the companies building them are facing increasing pressure to manage the potential for severe harm. OpenAI, a leader in the field, is making a high-profile move to address these concerns head-on by recruiting a senior executive solely focused on AI safety and risk mitigation.
A High-Stakes, High-Salary Role
OpenAI is actively seeking a "Head of Preparedness," a senior leadership position tasked with overseeing the technical strategy behind the company's safety framework. The role, announced by CEO Sam Altman, comes with a substantial compensation package of USD 555,000 per year plus equity, reflecting the critical importance and difficulty of the job. Altman himself described it as a "stressful job" where the successful candidate will "jump into the deep end pretty much immediately." The position is responsible for running what the company calls an "operationally scalable safety pipeline," which involves evaluating AI capabilities, developing threat models, and designing mitigations before new models are released to the public.
OpenAI Head of Preparedness Role Details
- Annual Salary: USD 555,000 + equity
- Core Responsibility: Oversee technical strategy for AI safety and risk mitigation (Preparedness Framework).
- Primary Risk Domains: Cybersecurity, Biological/Chemical capabilities, AI self-improvement.
- Definition of "Severe Harm": Outcomes including mass casualties (thousands) or economic damage exceeding hundreds of billions of dollars.
Defining and Containing "Severe Harm"
The core mandate of the Head of Preparedness is to track frontier AI capabilities that could create "new risks of severe harm." OpenAI's Preparedness Framework defines this severe harm on a catastrophic scale, including outcomes like "the death or grave injury of thousands of people" or "hundreds of billions of dollars of economic damage." The company has narrowed its primary focus to three high-stakes risk domains: cybersecurity, biological and chemical capabilities, and AI self-improvement. This move represents an attempt to institutionalize safety, creating a clear chain of responsibility with a "directly responsible individual" for ensuring that powerful models are rigorously stress-tested and only shipped with robust safeguards in place.
A Response to Growing Public and Internal Scrutiny
This hiring initiative comes amid mounting external skepticism and internal turbulence. Public trust in AI is declining; a recent Pew poll found that 50% of Americans are more concerned than excited about AI's role in daily life, a significant increase from 37% in 2021. Internally, OpenAI's safety efforts have faced criticism. Former safety leader Jan Leike stated in 2024 that "safety culture and processes have taken a backseat to shiny products." The company has also been impacted by reputational challenges, including multiple wrongful-death lawsuits alleging that ChatGPT responses contributed to user suicides, pushing the company to explicitly address risks like "psychosis or mania," "self-harm," and "emotional reliance on AI."
Public Sentiment on AI (Pew Research Data)
- Concern vs. Excitement: 50% of Americans are more concerned than excited about AI's growing role (up from 37% in 2021).
- Perceived Risk: 57% believe AI poses high risks to society.
- Desire for Regulation: 80% of U.S. adults want the government to maintain AI safety rules even if it slows development.
- Trust in AI Fairness: Only 2% fully trust AI to make fair, unbiased decisions.
The Evolving Challenge of AI Safety
The job listing underscores how AI risks have evolved from theoretical discussions to immediate, operational concerns. Threats now range from the relatively mundane, like job displacement and misinformation, to nightmare scenarios involving cyber warfare, engineered pathogens, and loss of human control to self-improving systems. Furthermore, OpenAI's own framework acknowledges the competitive pressures of the industry, noting that safety requirements may be "adjusted" if a rival releases a high-risk model without similar protections. This admission frames safety not as an impartial referee but as an integral, and contested, part of the technological race.
Rebuilding Trust Through Institutional Guardrails
By creating and funding this executive role, OpenAI is attempting to demonstrate that it takes catastrophic risks seriously and is building institutional guardrails. The company's safety organization has seen visible churn, with the previous head of preparedness, Aleksander Madry, being reassigned in July 2024. Hiring a dedicated, high-profile leader is an effort to stabilize this function and show a commitment to "ship frontier models without outsourcing the hard questions to a blog post and an apology drafted at 2 a.m." As AI systems become more deeply embedded in sensitive areas like mental health support and critical infrastructure, the public and regulators are increasingly treating safety promises as commitments that should come with real consequences if they fail. The new Head of Preparedness will be the person ultimately accountable for ensuring those promises are kept.