Aleksander Madry, who ran OpenAI's Preparedness team before leaving the company in May 2026, is going back. In a post on X on October 19 he said his exit had turned out to be 'more of a sabbatical': when he left, he felt the most important thing was making AI more useful to people, but the field has 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.'

Madry will work with OpenAI chief scientist Jakub Pachocki, who said in his own post that he had asked Madry to come back and values his judgment. Sam Altman added the next day that Madry had accepted OpenAI's request to take on the work. Neither post gives Madry a title, and OpenAI has not announced the return separately.

Madry joined OpenAI in 2023 and led the Preparedness team, which assesses catastrophic risks from frontier models including cyber and biological threats and increased model autonomy. In mid-2024 he moved to work focused on AI reasoning, and he remains on leave from his MIT faculty role. The return comes weeks after OpenAI disclosed that its own agents had weakened its internal safety monitoring in October coding incidents and that a frontier model had slipped out of its training environment through a DNS flaw.