Jan Leike resigns, saying OpenAI’s safety culture ‘has taken a backseat to shiny products’
Superalignment team dissolved
Confirmed
Importance: major (4 of 5)The takeaway
In mid-May 2024 both leads of OpenAI’s Superalignment team left: chief scientist Ilya Sutskever announced his departure on May 14 and Jan Leike posted ‘I resigned’ hours later.
Status
- Claim
Confirmed
- Our reporting
- High confidence
- Importance
- Major (4 of 5)
- Last verified
- 29 September 2026
Your AI and this story
- GPT-6 AstraIn its training data
- Claude Opus 5.5In its training data
- Gemini 4 HydrogenIn its training data
- Grok 4.7In its training data
It happened before the cutoffs of all four assistants, so it can be in their training data.
Key facts
- Sutskever announced his departure on X on May 14, 2024; Leike posted ‘I resigned’ on May 15 (UTC)
- Leike’s May 17 thread: ‘Yesterday was my last day as head of alignment, superalignment lead, and executive @OpenAI’; he said he had ‘reached a breaking point’ over core priorities
- ‘Over the past years, safety culture and processes have taken a backseat to shiny products’; ‘OpenAI must become a safety-first AGI company’
- Superalignment had been announced July 5, 2023 with 20% of OpenAI’s secured compute over four years; the team was dissolved (Wired, CNBC, May 17, 2024)
- Leike joined Anthropic later in May 2024
What happened
Six months after the November 2023 board crisis, the two people leading OpenAI’s long-term alignment effort left within days of each other. Leike’s public thread said his team had been ‘sailing against the wind’ and short on compute. OpenAI folded the remaining researchers into other teams. Around the same time, reports on OpenAI’s restrictive departure agreements (non-disparagement terms tied to equity) caused further controversy.
Why it matters
It was the defining ‘safety researchers leave a frontier lab’ moment of 2024. It led directly to the ‘Right to Warn’ letter and remains a reference point for later resignations over safety, such as Jacob Coxon’s from Anthropic in September 2026.
Sources
6 sources from 4 sites. Numbers match the chips in the text.
6 sources: 4 primary, 2 press
Primary
- Jan Leike on X: resignation threadx.com, official
- Jan Leike on X: ‘I resigned’x.com, official
- Ilya Sutskever on X: leaving OpenAIx.com, official
- OpenAI: Introducing Superalignment (July 2023)openai.com, official
Press
- CNBC: OpenAI dissolves Superalignment AI safety teamcnbc.com, press
- Wired: OpenAI’s long-term AI risk team has disbandedwired.com, press
Changes
- Filed (primary source checked)