OpenAI has folded safety into research again. Its head of safety is leaving.

OpenAI’s head of safety systems, Johannes Heidecke, is leaving the company following an internal restructuring that merges its safety and research teams under a single leader, Wired reported on Friday. Chief Research Officer Mark Chen told staff in a memo that safety teams would now report to Mia Glaese, whose title has been expanded to VP of Research and Safety, a newly created role.

Saachi Jain has been named interim head of safety systems while the company searches for Heidecke’s permanent replacement. It is the second time in less than two years that OpenAI has folded its safety organisation into a structure reporting to a research lead.

Heidecke’s tenure

Heidecke joined OpenAI in 2021 as an AI safety analyst and took over the head of safety systems role in 2024, succeeding Lilian Weng. His work covered model alignment, rule-based reward systems, and the company’s preparedness evaluations for potentially dangerous model capabilities.

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Chen thanked Heidecke in his note to employees, saying it is “important that our safety work is integrated with frontier-model development, with an earlier and more direct role in shaping key model, product and launch decisions.” Heidecke is the latest in a string of senior safety figures to leave or be reorganised out of the company in the past two years.

A pattern of disbandments

OpenAI’s Superalignment team, announced in 2023 with a pledge of 20% of the company’s compute, was dissolved in May 2024 after its co-leads, Ilya Sutskever and Jan Leike, departed. Leike wrote publicly on leaving that “safety culture and processes have taken a backseat to shiny products.”

The AGI Readiness team followed in October 2024 when its leader Miles Brundage resigned; the Mission Alignment team, Superalignment’s successor, was disbanded in February 2026 after 16 months, with its leader Joshua Achiam given the new title of “chief futurist.” In April, OpenAI lost its product chief, the head of Sora, and its enterprise CTO on a single day.

Heidecke’s departure arrives as more senior leaders continue to exit. Fidji Simo, OpenAI’s chief of applications, stepped down this month citing a prolonged medical recovery.

The case for integration

Glaese’s expanded title signals that OpenAI wants safety to remain a named priority even under the new structure. The company launched a Safety Fellowship on 6 April, inviting external researchers to conduct independent safety and alignment work at the lab.

Chen’s stated logic is that embedding safety inside research gives it a seat in model decisions from the start, rather than as a final checkpoint before launch. Critics argue that a safety team reporting inside research has less structural independence, and less leverage to delay or block a product, than one that reports separately.

External pressure

The departure comes as OpenAI navigates intensifying external scrutiny. Forty-two state attorneys general have opened an investigation into the company, serving a subpoena on advertising, user data, and internal policies shortly after it confidentially filed for a stock market listing.

Lilian Weng, who held the safety systems role before Heidecke, went on to join Thinking Machines Labs, the AI startup founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati. Murati has since warned publicly that AI governance is lagging behind model capability.