Sam Altman Offers Rs 5 Crore For High-Stakes AI Safety Role: "This Will Be A Stressful Job"

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently announced a high-stakes job opening for the Head of Preparedness, offering a base salary of $555,000 (Rs 4.94 crore) plus equity. Altman described the position as a "stressful job" where the successful candidate would be expected to evaluate and mitigate potential abuses of rapidly advancing AI capabilities. According to the Guardian, 'The Head of Preparedness' is tasked with leading OpenAI's efforts to anticipate and mitigate "catastrophic" risks as AI models become more powerful. 

Altman emphasised the need for deeper insight into how these technologies might be misused and how to reduce risks while maximizing the benefits. 

"We have a strong foundation of measuring growing capabilities, but we are entering a world where we need more nuanced understanding and measurement of how those capabilities could be abused and how we can limit those downsides both in our products and in the world, in a way that lets us all enjoy the tremendous benefits. These questions are hard, and there is little precedent; a lot of ideas that sound good have some real edge cases," Sam Altman, the chief executive of the San Francisco-based organisation, posted on X. 

"This will be a stressful job, and you'll jump into the deep end pretty much immediately," he added. The announcement prompted a wave of reactions online, including some sarcastic responses. 

See the tweet here:

We are hiring a Head of Preparedness. This is a critical role at an important time; models are improving quickly and are now capable of many great things, but they are also starting to present some real challenges. The potential impact of models on mental health was something we…

— Sam Altman (@sama) December 27, 2025

What will the job entail?

• Tracking and preparing for advanced AI capabilities that could cause severe harm if misused.
• Managing risks related to AI-driven cyberattacks, biological modeling, and autonomous reasoning.
• Building and coordinating rigorous capability evaluations, threat models, and mitigations to ensure a scalable safety framework.
• Addressing the societal and psychological challenges posed by advanced AI interactions.

The job opening comes amid the AI industry titans raising serious concerns about the tech. Mustafa Suleyman, Microsoft AI's CEO, said, "If you're not a little bit afraid right now, you're not paying attention." Demis Hassabis from Google DeepMind also warned about AIs going "off the rails in some way that harms humanity."

Amid limited regulation of artificial intelligence at both national and global levels, partly due to resistance from Donald Trump's administration, AI companies are largely left to self-regulate. Prominent computer scientist Yoshua Bengio, often referred to as one of the "godfathers of AI," recently remarked that "a sandwich has more regulation than AI,' highlighting the gap in oversight.