In a significant move highlighting the growing concerns around advanced artificial intelligence, OpenAI's CEO Sam Altman has personally announced a high-stakes job opening for a 'Head of Preparedness'. The role, described as critical, comes with an annual compensation package of up to $555,000 plus equity, underscoring its importance to the company's future.
What Does the Head of Preparedness Do?
This leadership position is at the heart of OpenAI's strategy to anticipate and mitigate severe risks posed by its most powerful models. The appointed individual will be responsible for building and overseeing a comprehensive safety framework. This involves creating evaluations for frontier AI capabilities, developing threat models, and designing mitigations across major risk domains like cybersecurity and biological threats.
The official job description states the Head of Preparedness will own the technical strategy end-to-end, ensuring safeguards are technically sound and effective. They will lead a small team and collaborate across research, engineering, product, and policy teams to integrate safety measures into real-world deployment and product launch decisions.
Altman's Urgent Call for Applicants
Taking to X (formerly Twitter), Sam Altman framed the hiring as a response to rapidly evolving AI capabilities. He noted that while models are achieving great things, they are also presenting 'some real challenges'. He gave a stark example, revealing that AI models are now becoming proficient enough at computer security to begin discovering critical vulnerabilities.
"If you want to help the world figure out how to enable cybersecurity defenders with cutting edge capabilities while ensuring attackers can't use them for harm... please consider applying," Altman wrote. He extended this challenge to the safe release of biological capabilities and ensuring the safety of self-improving systems. The CEO was upfront about the demands, warning, "This will be a stressful job and you'll jump into the deep end pretty much immediately."
The High Stakes of Frontier AI Safety
The creation of this role signals a pivotal moment for OpenAI and the broader AI industry. As models grow more powerful, the potential for misuse or unintended catastrophic consequences increases. The Head of Preparedness will be tasked with navigating this uncharted territory where, as Altman admits, there is little precedent and many ideas have real edge cases.
The job is not just about internal product safety but has a global mandate. The goal is to develop a nuanced understanding of how advanced capabilities could be abused and to create ways to limit those downsides, allowing society to safely enjoy AI's tremendous benefits. With a lucrative salary and a direct reporting line into the company's core safety efforts, this role is positioned as one of the most critical AI safety positions in the world today.
