An OpenAI safety research lead departed for Anthropic

January 15, 2026 Hayden Field

One of the most controversial issues in the AI industry over the past year was what to do when a user displays signs of mental health struggles in a chatbot conversation. OpenAI's head of that type of safety research, Andrea Vallone, has now joined Anthropic.

"Over the past year, I led OpenAI's research on a question with almost no established precedents: how should models respond when confronted with signs of emotional over-reliance or early indications of mental health distress?" Vallone wrote in a LinkedIn post a couple of months ago.

Vallone, who spent three years at OpenAI and built out the "model policy" research team there, worked …

Read the full story at The Verge.

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