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OpenAI Looking for a Head of Preparedness to Make AI Models Safer, Offers $500K Plus Equity

OpenAI Looking for a Head of Preparedness to Make AI Models Safer, Offers $500K Plus Equity

OpenAI’s Head of Preparedness will have to create a preparedness framework by identifying threats.

Written by Akash Dutta, Edited by Ketan Pratap | Updated: 29 December 2025 13:21 IST

OpenAI Looking for a Head of Preparedness to Make AI Models Safer, Offers $500K Plus Equity

Photo Credit: Reuters

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman called the Head of Preparedness a critical role

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Highlights

The professional will be paid $555K annually and equity
OpenAI’s new role includes building threat models and safety mitigations
The individual should be an expert in machine learning and AI safety

OpenAI is looking for a Head of Preparedness who will help the artificial intelligence (AI) company anticipate threats that can emerge from its AI models and plan ways to mitigate them. The company is also willing to pay a massive payout for the role in both cash and equity. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman called the position critical to the company's functioning, highlighting that the employee will be focused on evaluating frontier models before they are released publicly. Notably, this comes at a time when the company is facing multiple lawsuits alleging ChatGPT's role in encouraging users to commit murder and suicide.

OpenAI Wants a Head of Preparedness to Improve AI Safety

In a new listing on its careers page, the AI giant said it is looking for a Head of Preparedness. It is a senior role in the Safety Systems team, which “ensures that OpenAI's most capable models can be responsibly developed and deployed.” The role is based in San Francisco and comes with a listed annual salary of up to $555,000 (roughly Rs. 4.99 crore) plus equity.

OpenAI CEO shared the listing on X (formerly known as Twitter), noting that the position is critical as model capabilities continue to grow quickly. In his post, Altman described it as a “stressful job” that will involve diving into complex safety challenges immediately upon joining the company.

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The official job description says the Head of Preparedness will lead the technical strategy and execution of the company's Preparedness framework, which is part of the broader Safety Systems organisation. The role will be responsible for building and coordinating capability evaluations, establishing detailed threat models, and developing mitigations that form “a coherent, rigorous, and operationally scalable safety pipeline.”

Core responsibilities listed in the job description include designing precise and robust capability evaluations for rapid model development cycles, creating threat models across multiple risk domains, and overseeing mitigation strategies that align with identified threats. The role demands deep technical judgement and clear communication to guide complex work across the safety organisation.

OpenAI opened this new position at a time when its AI systems have come under scrutiny for allegedly causing unintended harmful impact on users and the broader world. Recently, ChatGPT was implicated in a teenager's suicide, and a 55-year-old man's murder-suicide. The company's AI browser, ChatGPT Atlas, is also said to be vulnerable to prompt injections.

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Further reading: OpenAI, AI, Artificial Intelligence

Akash Dutta Email Akash Dutta

Akash Dutta is a Chief Sub Editor at Gadgets 360. He is particularly interested in the social impact of technological developments and loves reading about emerging fields such as AI, metaverse, and fediverse. In his free time, he can be seen supporting his favourite football club - Chelsea, watching movies and anime, and sharing passionate opinions on food. More