OpenAI hiring $555k head of AI preparedness to manage frontier risks

OpenAI’s hunt for a Head of Preparedness is effectively a search for a chief risk architect for frontier AI, and the compensation level signals how central this function has become. The role sits on the Safety Systems team and owns the preparedness framework: building capability evaluations, threat models and mitigations for cyber, bio and other catastrophic risks as models scale. Combined with Altman’s description of the job as “stressful,” it’s a clear admission that systems on OpenAI’s roadmap are powerful enough to warrant a standing, high‑level organ focused solely on worst‑case scenarios. ([businessinsider.com](https://www.businessinsider.com/openai-hiring-head-of-preparedness-ai-job-2025-12))

For the race to AGI, this move illustrates how frontier labs are institutionalizing safety as a parallel track to capability growth. Preparedness isn’t just policy language; it’s the set of gates that determine whether a new model can launch at all. That gives this hire outsized influence over the pace at which OpenAI can roll out more agentic, autonomous systems—and over the evidentiary bar they must clear to be deemed “safe enough.” It also responds, at least symbolically, to earlier criticism that OpenAI’s safety culture had eroded as commercial pressure rose. ([businessinsider.com](https://www.businessinsider.com/openai-hiring-head-of-preparedness-ai-job-2025-12))

Competitively, if OpenAI can turn preparedness into repeatable tooling—robust eval suites, red‑teaming pipelines, and cross‑domain threat models—it gains a narrative edge with regulators and enterprise customers who increasingly see frontier AI as a regulated product class, not a generic cloud API. Expect Anthropic, Google DeepMind and others to highlight similar roles and frameworks; within a year, “preparedness” could be as standard in AI org charts as “reliability engineering” is in cloud.