OpenAI Safety Expert Returns After Months Away, Citing Rising AI Risks

OpenAI is bringing back Aleksander Madry, its former head of preparedness. He left the company that makes ChatGPT several months ago to explore other opportunities. Now, he says AI is advancing so quickly that keeping it safe and secure has become more urgent.

Madry announced his return in a post on X. He said that what he first thought would be a permanent departure had turned into more of a break from work.

"When I left a few months ago, I felt that the most important thing to focus on was making AI more useful to people," Madry wrote. "But we've since entered a different regime of AI progress. One in which getting the safety and security challenges of increasingly capable AI right has to become a central priority."

Madry will return to OpenAI and work with Jakub Pachocki, the company's chief scientist, to help decide how to deal with these challenges.

"As AI becomes more capable, I'm focused on questions around the pace and implications of progress, and how they should inform the strategy of OpenAI and across the field. I asked Aleksander to come back to OpenAI to work with me on these topics. I value his judgment and am glad to have him on the team again," Pachocki replied to Madry's post on X.

From AI Safety to Economic Impact

Madry announced that he was leaving OpenAI in May. He described his nearly three years at the company as an "experience of a lifetime."

At the time, he said he wanted to study how AI could change the economy. This included how businesses understand information, make decisions, and run their operations.

Madry joined OpenAI in 2024 and became its head of preparedness. His job was to find and address risks from advanced AI models that could cause extremely serious harm. CNBC reported at the time that he was later moved to work on AI reasoning.

Before joining OpenAI, Madry led MIT's Center for Deployable Machine Learning and was a faculty co-lead of the MIT AI Policy Forum.

OpenAI Faces Growing AI and Infrastructure Challenges

Madry's return comes as OpenAI expands the computing systems it needs to support more advanced AI. Major investments and changes among company leaders are also reshaping how the business operates.

Last week, OpenAI named former xAI infrastructure executive Uday Ruddarraju as chief technology officer for compute, after promoting him in July.

Sachin Katti, who previously led the infrastructure team, is preparing to leave that role but will stay at the company as an adviser.

In July, Katti took charge of GPT-Infra. He led efforts to use OpenAI's models to design semiconductors and build infrastructure. He recently said customers were already testing the models to develop central processing units (CPUs) and edge chips.

The effort will now be led by Richard Ho, who heads OpenAI's chip work.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has predicted that the company will spend trillions of dollars on infrastructure to build more advanced AI models and make them available for wider use.

In recent months, several executives who helped secure, fund, and develop data center capacity have left the company.

Chris Malone, who helped manage OpenAI's data center expansion, left the company in August. Earlier this year, Peter Hoeschele, an important figure in the company's Stargate infrastructure project, joined Meta Platforms with two other colleagues.

Photo: Evolf on Shutterstock.com

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