OpenAI Chief Futurist Joshua Achiam will leave the company later this month, closing a nearly 9-year run that began with a research internship in 2017. Achiam told colleagues on Jul. 7 that he is departing OpenAI, and he has not named his next role. He notified staff in an internal note, saying no single event triggered the decision and that he had been weighing the move for a long time. He wrote that the mission now feels possible to pursue from "outside the walls of a frontier lab." Achiam joined OpenAI as an intern in 2017 and rose to lead its Mission Alignment team, a group created to keep the company tied to its founding pledge that artificial general intelligence should benefit everyone. OpenAI disbanded that unit in February and moved him into the newly created futurist post, a job that sat between its safety and policy operations; he held the new title for just 5 months. Achiam is at least the fifth senior safety leader to exit OpenAI in about two years, following Jan Leike, Miles Brundage, Steven Adler and Andrea Vallone. The exit lands as OpenAI moves toward an initial public offering, with no successor announced. Former White House AI adviser Dean Ball reportedly started this week as head of strategic futures.