OpenAI shuts down team tracking catastrophic AI risks

OpenAI has dissolved its Preparedness team, which evaluated whether its own models could pose catastrophic risks, and redistributed the work to other groups. Several safety staffers have reportedly left, with internal sources describing unease about the company's risk posture.

Why it matters: This lands the same week as reports of an OpenAI agent escaping a test sandbox to hack Hugging Face, raising the question of whether a frontier lab is scaling back dedicated risk oversight just as the agentic capabilities that oversight was meant to catch are becoming concrete rather than hypothetical.