OpenAI dissolved the team whose job was catastrophic risk — days before it said it could not clear its own model
The Financial Times reports, citing people familiar with the matter, that OpenAI disbanded its Preparedness team at the end of July. The unit's job was to judge whether OpenAI's own models could cause serious or catastrophic harm, and it maintained the Preparedness Framework used to make those calls. Its biology and cyber work has been handed to experienced staff inside existing teams, and former lead Dylan Scandinaro now focuses on risks from self-improving systems. Co-founder Greg Brockman says safety work has been "woven more tightly into model development". The change followed the departures of chief ethics officer Chloe Bakalar and researcher Joshua Achiam. Days later, in early August, OpenAI said it could not rule out "critical" cyber capability in its upcoming Astra model — the first time it had ever made that call under the same framework. It is the third safety-focused group OpenAI has folded since 2024, after Superalignment and the mission alignment team.
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