Examining the $555,000 AI Safety Role: Addressing Cognitive Bias in ChatGPT
When a company offers up to $555,000 per year (plus equity) for a single safety leadership role, it’s usually not because the job is glamorous. It’s because the work sits at the intersection of fast-moving model capability, high-stakes risk, and real-world uncertainty. That was the context for OpenAI’s “ Head of Preparedness ” position—shared publicly by Sam Altman as a critical, high-pressure role intended to help OpenAI evaluate and mitigate the kinds of frontier risks that can cause severe harm. The public discussion around the job highlighted several domains at once: cybersecurity misuse, biological risk, model release decisions, and broader concerns about how advanced systems may affect people when deployed at scale. TL;DR The role: “Head of Preparedness” — a safety leadership position focused on OpenAI’s Preparedness framework and severe-harm risk domains. The pay: the job listing described compensation up to $555,000 annually plus equity. Th...