Heidecke exit extends OpenAI's safety-leadership revolving door

Aleksander Madry joined OpenAI to lead its Preparedness team, which evaluates severe risks from capable models. He was moved out of that role in 2024 and shifted to AI reasoning before leaving in May 2026.

Miles Achiam left in July. He previously led Mission Alignment. "There's not a specific reason for me leaving," he wrote on X. "The world is in on the secret now and it feels possible to work on the mission from outside the walls of a frontier lab."

The departures have hollowed out OpenAI's safety leadership. The Superalignment team was dissolved after Sutskever and Leike left, with remaining employees distributed across other research groups. OpenAI now says it will embed safety within research teams rather than maintain a separate safety division.

The pattern has drawn attention from industry observers. Andrew Curran, a prominent AI analyst, called OpenAI's revolving door of safety leads a "curse" in reference to Harry Potter. "The curse upon the Defense Against the Dark Arts position at OpenAI has claimed yet another victim," he wrote.

The churn contrasts with Anthropic, which has retained its core safety leadership despite some departures. Anthropic cofounder Dario Amodei left OpenAI in 2020 over disagreements about AI safety direction and started Anthropic a year later. In February, Mrinank Sharma, who led Anthropic's Safeguards Research Team, left and warned that AI companies face pressure to "set aside what matters most." Dylan Scand, an Anthropic safety researcher, also left this year to become OpenAI's head of preparedness. Still, Anthropic's senior safety team has largely stayed intact.

For the broader AI sector, the repeated departures raise questions about how frontier labs balance safety research with product release pressure. OpenAI's reorganization under Glaese is an attempt to fuse the two functions. "You can't make good safety decisions without understanding the underlying model capabilities, and you can't make good research decisions without understanding the safety implications," a spokesperson told Business Insider.

Whether that structure retains talent remains to be seen. Heidecke's departure suggests the integration plan did not keep him. No date has been set for his replacement.