OpenAI team disbanded: risk oversight scattered as IPO nears
OpenAI has quietly pulled apart one of its most important internal safeguards, disbanding the team responsible for spotting the most dangerous risks its artificial intelligence models could pose. According to the Financial Times, the OpenAI team disbanded at the end of July 2026 was the company’s preparedness group, the unit tasked with flagging whether its models could be misused for things like biological weapons development or large-scale cyberattacks, and figuring out how to stop that from happening.
Key takeaways
- OpenAI disbanded its preparedness team at the end of July 2026, according to the Financial Times.
- The team’s job was to assess serious risks from AI models and build ways to mitigate them, including bio and cyber threats.
- Risk responsibility is being split up and folded into existing teams rather than handled by one dedicated group.
- Ethics lead Chloé Bakalar, Chief Futurist Josh Achiam, and head of safety Johannes Heidecke have all recently left OpenAI.
- Former Anthropic staffer Dylan Scandinaro, who led preparedness, is shifting his focus to recursive self-improving AI.
What happened to OpenAI’s preparedness team
OpenAI’s preparedness team existed to answer one blunt question: could a model do real damage before it ships? That meant testing whether a system could help someone build a bioweapon, run a sophisticated hacking operation, or otherwise cause serious harm, and then designing safeguards to reduce that risk. Now that centralized function no longer exists as its own unit.
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