OpenAI is dissolving the Mission Alignment team, which focused on developing “safe” and “trustworthy” AI.

OpenAI has disbanded a team that focused — as the company described itself — on ensuring its AI systems are “safe, trustworthy, and consistently aligned with human values.” Meanwhile, the team’s former leader has been given a new role as the company’s ‘chief futurist’.

OpenAI confirmed to TechCrunch that team members have now been hired for other roles. The news was first reported by Platformer.

The disbanded team, which appears to have been formed in September 2024, was the startup’s internal unit dedicated to working on alignment. This is a broad area of ​​interest within industry that seeks to ensure AI acts in accordance with human interests.

“We want these systems to consistently follow human intentions in complex real-world scenarios and adversarial conditions, avoid catastrophic behavior, and remain controllable, auditable, and consistent with human values,” said a post from OpenAI’s Alignment Research blog.

The Alignment team’s OpenAI job posting describes it as dedicated to AI research focused on “developing methodologies that enable AI to robustly follow human intentions across a wide range of scenarios, including adversarial or high-stakes scenarios.”

In a blog post published on Wednesday, Josh Achiam, former head of OpenAI’s Alignment team, explained his new role as the company’s chief futurist. “My goal is to support OpenAI’s mission – to ensure that AGI benefits all of humanity – by studying how the world will change in response to AI, AGI and beyond,” Achiam wrote.

Achim noted that, in his new position, he will collaborate with Jason Pruitt, a physicist on the OpenAI technical staff.

An OpenAI spokesperson said the rest of the Alignment team — a group of six or seven people — was later reassigned to different parts of the company. The spokesman could not say exactly where the team members were assigned, but said they were engaged in similar work in those roles. It was also not clear whether Akhayam would have a new team as part of his “future” role.

The spokesman attributed the dissolution of the team to the types of routine reorganizations that occur within a fast-moving company.

OpenAI previously had what it called a “hypercompatibility team” — which was formed in 2023 and focused on studying long-term existential threats posed by AI — but that team was disbanded in 2024.

Akhiyam’s personal website still lists him as the head of Mission Alignment at OpenAI, and describes him as interested in ensuring that “the future of humanity is good in the long term.” His LinkedIn profile shows that he has served as President of Mission Alignment since September 2024.