Miles Brundage, a longtime policy researcher at OpenAI and senior advisor to the company’s AGI Readiness team, has left.
In a post on X today and an essay on his personal blog, Brundage said that he believes he’ll have more impact as a policy researcher and advocate in the nonprofit sector, where he’ll have “more of an ability to publish freely and more independence.”
“Part of what made this a hard decision is that working at OpenAI is an incredibly high impact opportunity, now more than ever,” Brundage said. “OpenAI needs employees who care deeply about the mission and who are committed to sustaining a culture of rigorous decision-making about development and deployment (including internal deployment, which will become increasingly important over time).”
With Brundage’s departure, OpenAI’s economic research division, which until recently was a sub-team of AGI Readiness, will move under OpenAI’s new chief economist Ronnie Chatterji. The remainder of the AGI Readiness team will be distributed among other OpenAI divisions, Brundage says; Joshua Achiam, head of mission alignment at OpenAI, will take on some of the AGI Readiness teams’ projects.
Brundage joined OpenAI in 2018, where he began as a research scientist and later became the company’s head of policy research. Before joining OpenAI, he was a research fellow at the University of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute.
