OpenAI is losing another leading security researcher, Lilian Weng

One of OpenAI’s leading security researchers, Lilian Weng, announced on Friday that she is leaving the startup. Weng has served as VP of research and security since August, and before that, he was head of OpenAI’s security systems team.

In a post on X, Weng said “after 7 years at OpenAI, I feel ready to reset and try something new.” Weng said his last day would be November 15, but did not specify where he would go.

“I have made the very difficult decision to leave OpenAI,” Weng said in the post. “Looking at what we have achieved, I am proud of everyone on the Safety Systems team and I have high hopes that the team will continue to improve.”

Weng’s departure marks the latest in a long line of AI security researchers, policy researchers, and other executives who have left the company in the past year, and several have accused OpenAI of prioritizing commercial products over AI security. Weng joins Ilya Sutskever and Jan Leike — leaders of the now-disbanded OpenAI team, which tried to develop ways to guide intelligent AI systems — who also left earlier this year to work on AI security elsewhere.

Weng first joined OpenAI in 2018, according to his LinkedIn, working on the startup’s robotics team that ended up building a robotic hand that could solve a Rubik’s cube — a task that took two years to accomplish, according to him.

As OpenAI began to focus more on the GPT paradigm, so did Weng. A researcher transitioned to help build an applied AI research team in 2021. After the launch of GPT-4, Weng was tasked with creating a team dedicated to building security systems that would begin in 2023. Today, OpenAI’s security systems unit has more than 80 scientists, researchers, and policy experts, according to Weng’s post.

That’s a lot of AI security folks, but many have raised concerns about OpenAI’s focus on security as it tries to build powerful AI systems. Miles Brundage, a longtime policy researcher, left the startup in October and announced that OpenAI was disbanding its AGI readiness team, which he had advised. On the same day, the New York Times profiled a former OpenAI researcher, Suchir Balaji, who said he left OpenAI because he thought the startup’s technology would do more harm than good to society.

OpenAI tells TechCrunch that executives and security researchers are working on a transition to replace Weng.

“We greatly appreciate Lilian’s contributions to security research and building strong technical defenses,” an OpenAI spokesperson said in an emailed statement. “We hope that the Safety Systems team will continue to play an important role in ensuring that our systems are safe and reliable, serving hundreds of millions of people around the world.”

Other executives who have left OpenAI in recent months include CTO Mira Murati, chief research officer Bob McGrew, and VP of research Barret Zoph. In August, prominent researcher Andrej Karpathy and founder John Schulman also announced they would be leaving the startup. Some of these people, including Leike and Schulman, left to join OpenAI’s rival, Anthropic, while others went on to start their own businesses.