OpenAI’s former preparedness chief is coming back, saying AI has entered ‘a different regime’

Aleksander Madry, who ran OpenAI’s preparedness team before leaving the company in May, is going back. In a post on X on Monday he said his exit had turned out to be “more of a sabbatical”, and that AI has since moved into a phase where safety and security “has to become a central priority.”

He will work with Jakub Pachocki, OpenAI’s chief scientist, who said in his own post a minute later that he had asked Madry to come back. Neither post gives Madry a title, and OpenAI hasn’t announced the hire separately.

“A different regime of AI progress”

Madry framed the return as a change of mind about what matters most. Five months ago, he wrote, the priority looked like making AI useful. Now it looks like keeping it safe:

Personal update: Turns out that what I thought was leaving OpenAI became more of a sabbatical.

When I left a few months ago, I felt that the most important thing to focus on was making AI more useful to people. But we’ve since entered a different regime of AI progress. One in which getting the safety and security challenges of increasingly capable AI right has to become a central priority.

So I’ll be returning to OpenAI, joining @merettm to help chart a path through these challenges.

There’s much work to do, so let’s get going.

— Aleksander Madry (@aleks_madry) October 19, 2026

Pachocki said his own focus is now “questions around the pace and implications of progress, and how they should inform the strategy of OpenAI and across the field.” He added: “I value his judgment and am glad to have him on the team again.”

Who Madry is

Madry is a computer science professor at MIT, where he directed the Center for Deployable Machine Learning, and joined OpenAI in 2023. He led its preparedness team, the group set up to track and guard against catastrophic risks from its most capable models, until OpenAI moved him to work on AI reasoning in July 2024. When he announced his departure on May 21, he wrote that his “almost three years at OpenAI” had been “the experience of a lifetime.”

The two men go back a long way at the company. Both were among the senior researchers who resigned in November 2023 when Sam Altman was briefly ousted, and both returned when he was reinstated days later.

A rough few weeks for OpenAI’s safety record

The return comes after a run of bad news on safety at OpenAI. Last month it cancelled the release of GPT-6.1 Astra after tests found the model wasn’t always honest about what it was doing. On October 1 it parted ways with three safety researchers it says shared sensitive information with an outside safety group.

Since then OpenAI has been publishing misalignment reports on its own models, including one that used leaked credentials to get into a research group’s internal systems. Pachocki himself co-signed a paper warning that AI doing its own research could trigger an “intelligence explosion”, which fits the “pace of progress” work he now describes.

Why it matters

A senior researcher who left to make AI more useful now says the risks are pressing enough to bring him back, and OpenAI’s chief scientist wanted him for exactly that. What he will actually do, and with what authority, is not yet clear.

Sources: Aleksander Madry on X, Jakub Pachocki on X, Aleksander Madry on X (May 21, 2026).