OpenAI is hiring someone to worry about the risks of AI

OpenAI is preparing to hire a Head of Preparedness- or essentially someone whose job it is to worry about all of the ways that AI could go terribly wrong.

In a post on X, OpenAI’s Sam Altman acknowledged how fast AI models are improving and that they are now “present some real challenges.” In the post, Altman also calls out the potential impact on people’s mental health and the dangers of any AI-powered cybersecurity weapons.

We are hiring a Head of Preparedness. This is a critical role at an important time; models are improving quickly and are now capable of many great things, but they are also starting to present some real challenges. The potential impact of models on mental health was something we…

— Sam Altman (@sama) December 27, 2025

According to the job listing, the person would be responsible for “leading the development of frontier capability evaluations,” and “Oversee mitigation design across major risk areas, ensuring safeguards are technically sound, effective, and aligned with underlying threat modules,” among other things.

Altman also noted that it is a stressful job (obviously), and that the successful candidate will be “thrown into the deep end pretty much immediately,” so good luck with training.

This new listing is coming following a string of wrongful death lawsuits, especially the death of Adam Raine in April, in which parents Matt and Maria Raine claim that GPT-40 was psychologically manipulative, and according to the British Broadcasting Corporation and court filings, “validated his most harmful and self-destructive thoughts.”

Although this could be considered a little late just now to be filling a position, looking at the potential mental health dangers that these models create, there is also a claim of better late than never that could be made- Especially as AI is being used for more nefarious uses, such as deepfakes that have caused a string of privacy concerns.

Source: The Verge