OpenAI disbands preparedness team amid restructuring ahead of expected IPO

OpenAI quietly disbanded its Preparedness team at the end of July, according to the Financial Times. The team’s entire mandate was evaluating whether frontier AI models posed serious risks, things like rogue systems hacking other companies or enabling biological threats, and then figuring out how to stop those scenarios from happening. Instead of maintaining a dedicated unit, OpenAI has carved up those responsibilities by domain, splitting bio and cyber risk assessment across existing teams. A pattern, not an incident This would be notable on its own. But it’s the third safety-focused team OpenAI has dissolved in roughly two years, which starts to look less like reorganization and more like a trend. The AGI Readiness team was disbanded in 2024. The Mission Alignment team was closed in February 2026. Now the Preparedness team joins them. Each dissolution came with a version of the same explanation: the work isn’t going away, it’s just being integrated into other parts of the organization. Co-founder Greg Brockman has suggested this approach actually strengthens safety by embedding it directly into model development and product teams rather than siloing it in a separate group. Execut...