OpenAI $555K preparedness chief role elevates frontier AI safety

OpenAI turning “Head of Preparedness” into a marquee, $555K‑plus role is a strong signal about where frontier labs think the real bottleneck now lies. The job description effectively puts one executive in charge of translating abstract x‑risk debates into concrete evaluation regimes and launch decisions across cyber, bio, mental‑health and other high‑impact domains. That nudges preparedness from a research‑adjacent concern into a line function tied directly to product cadence.

Strategically, this is OpenAI acknowledging that its future hinges as much on governance capacity as on GPU supply. As models like GPT‑5 and beyond gain tool‑use, autonomy and code‑exploitation skills, the cost of getting safety triage wrong rises sharply. By centralizing authority over red‑teaming, threat modeling and “ship / don’t‑ship” guidance, OpenAI is trying to avoid the fragmented safety org structure that drew criticism earlier in 2025. It also sets a de facto bar for peers: if you want to be taken seriously in Washington, Brussels or Beijing, you need someone at this level whose entire mandate is frontier risk.

For the race to AGI, this move doesn’t slow capability work; it professionalizes the brakes. Preparedness done well could enable faster, more confident deployments by making risk arguments legible to boards and regulators, rather than decided ad hoc in Slack threads hours before a launch.