OpenAI Quietly Dissolved Its Team That Watched for AI Going Rogue
The group whose whole job was to spot dangers in OpenAI's own models is gone. Safety critics say the timing is telling.
Key points
- OpenAI disbanded its dedicated preparedness team at the end of April 2025, according to the Financial Times.
- The preparedness team's job was to test whether AI models posed serious risks, such as hacking other systems or acting unpredictably.
- Responsibility for those risk checks has been split by topic (biology, cybersecurity, and similar areas) and folded into teams that already existed.
- Several senior safety figures have left OpenAI recently, including ethics lead Chloé Bakalar and head of safety Johannes Heidecke.
- The team's former head, Dylan Scandinaro, now focuses on so-called "recursive self-improving" AI, meaning systems that could rewrite and upgrade themselves without human input.
OpenAI no longer has a single team whose purpose was to ask the uncomfortable question: could our own model turn dangerous?
The preparedness team, as it was known inside the company, was responsible for red-teaming OpenAI's models. Red-teaming means deliberately trying to make a system misbehave, the way a security researcher tries to break into a computer before a real attacker does. The team looked at worst-case scenarios: could a model help someone build a biological weapon? Could it hack another company on its own? If the answer to any of those questions looked alarming, the team was supposed to find ways to pull the risk back.
Now that team is gone.
First reported by the Financial Times, the decision came at the end of last month. OpenAI did not eliminate the work entirely. Instead, it broke the responsibilities into specific subject areas and handed each piece to existing departments. Cybersecurity risk goes to the cyber team. Biological risk goes elsewhere. No single group holds the whole picture.
Why does this matter to ordinary people?
For most people, powerful AI models are already embedded in tools they use at work, in search engines, in customer-service bots. The preparedness team was one of the internal guardrails designed to catch problems before those tools reach the public. Fewer dedicated safety staff means the checks happen differently, not necessarily less, but the structure that existed specifically to sound an alarm is gone.
Jan Leike, a prominent AI safety researcher who resigned from OpenAI in 2024, told the Financial Times that the company was pushing "shiny products" ahead of safety considerations. He is not alone. The preparedness team's dissolution is the latest in a series of structural changes. OpenAI has already wound down its AGI Readiness team (AGI stands for artificial general intelligence, meaning a system that could match or surpass human reasoning across many tasks) and its Superalignment team, which was studying how to keep very powerful future AI systems under human control.
Bakalar, Heidecke, and Chief Futurist Josh Achiam have all departed in recent months.
What happens next?
Dylan Scandinaro, who joined OpenAI from rival lab Anthropic in February, will now concentrate on recursive self-improving AI: systems capable of rewriting their own code to become more capable without a human telling them to. That is arguably the highest-stakes safety problem in the field, so his work continues, just outside the preparedness structure.
OpenAI is heading toward what analysts widely expect to be a large initial public offering, a stock-market listing that would let outside investors buy shares in the company. Critics argue that pressure to impress future investors is pushing safety to the margins. OpenAI has not publicly commented on the specifics of the reorganisation.
