OpenAI reportedly disbanded its AI risk preparedness team

The Financial Times reports OpenAI disbanded its preparedness team, the group tasked with assessing whether models pose serious risks such as bio or cyber misuse, at the end of last month. Responsibility for those risk areas has reportedly been split up and folded into existing product teams rather than owned by a dedicated unit.

Why it matters: This lands right after separate reports that OpenAI paused frontier reinforcement learning (RL) training and slowed model development over cyberattack risk fears, so dissolving a dedicated risk-assessment team cuts against that stated caution. It fits a broader pattern of OpenAI restructuring safety functions as it heads toward an IPO, and raises the question of whether risk assessment gets diluted when spread across product teams instead of centralized.