OpenAI’s head of security systems, Johannes Heidecke, will leave the company following an internal restructuring that merges its security and research teams under a single leader, Wired reported on Friday. Research director Mark Chen told staff in a memo that security teams would now report to Mia Glaese, whose title has been expanded to vice president of research and security, a newly created position.
Saachi Jain has been named interim head of security systems while the company searches for a permanent replacement for Heidecke. It is the second time in less than two years that OpenAI has integrated its security organization into a structure that reports to a research leader.
Heidecke’s mandate
Heidecke joined OpenAI in 2021 as an AI security analyst and took on the role of head of security systems in 2024, replacing Lilian Weng. His work spanned model alignment, rules-based reward systems, and enterprise readiness assessments for potentially dangerous model capabilities.
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Chen thanked Heidecke in his note to employees, saying it is “important that our security work be integrated with cutting-edge model development, with an earlier and more direct role in shaping key decisions about models, products and releases.” Heidecke is the latest in a series of senior security officials to leave or reorganize outside the company in the past two years.
A pattern of solutions
OpenAI’s Superalignment team, announced in 2023 with a promise of 20% of the company’s compute, dissolved in May 2024 after its co-directors, Ilya Sutskever and Jan Leike, departed. Leike wrote publicly upon leaving that “safety culture and processes have taken a backseat to brilliant products.”
The AGI Readiness team followed in October 2024, when its leader Miles Brundage resigned; The Mission Alignment team, successor to Superalignment, disbanded in February 2026 after 16 months, with its leader Joshua Achiam given the new title of “chief futurist.” In April, OpenAI lost its product manager, Sora’s boss, and its enterprise CTO in a single day..
Heidecke’s departure comes as more senior leaders continue to exit. Fidji Simo, Head of Applications at OpenAIhe resigned this month citing a prolonged medical recovery.
The case of integration
Glaese’s expanded title indicates that OpenAI wants security to remain a priority even under the new structure. The company launched a Security Scholarship on April 6inviting external researchers to perform independent safety and alignment work in the laboratory.
Chen’s stated logic is that incorporating security into the research gives it a place in model decisions from the beginning, rather than being a final checkpoint before release. Critics argue that a security team that reports within the investigation has less structural independence and less leverage to delay or block a product than one that reports separately.
External pressure
The departure comes as OpenAI navigates increasingly intense external scrutiny. Forty-two state attorneys general have opened an investigation at the company, serving a subpoena over advertising, user data and internal policies shortly after it confidentially applied for a stock market listing.
Lilian Weng, who held the security systems role before Heidecke, has joined Thinking Machines Labs, the AI startup founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati. Murati has since publicly warned that the governance of AI is behind the capacity of the model.
