OpenAI has announced the appointment of Paul Christiano to the OpenAI Foundation Board, where he will serve as a non-voting observer on the OpenAI Group PBC Board. He will also join the Foundation Board’s Safety and Security Committee (SSC), working alongside committee chair Zico Kolter.
The SSC is responsible for overseeing safety and security practices across OpenAI, including those of OpenAI Group PBC. Christiano’s appointment is expected to bring additional technical expertise and experience to the organisation’s governance and approach to managing the risks associated with advanced AI systems.
Christiano brings government experience from his work across two U.S. administrations at the Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI) within the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), an agency of the U.S. Department of Commerce, where he serves as a Senior Tech Advisor. His work has included evaluating frontier AI models, including capabilities with potential national security implications, as well as developing approaches to address related safety and security risks.
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He is also the founder of the Alignment Research Center (ARC), a nonprofit research organisation focused on ensuring that advanced AI systems remain aligned with human interests. Christiano previously spent time at OpenAI, where he led alignment research from 2017 to 2021 and contributed foundational research to reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), an important technique in the development of modern AI systems.
Through his new role, Christiano will contribute a technically focused perspective to OpenAI’s governance and safety decisions. His combination of AI alignment research, government experience and work on frontier-model evaluation is expected to support the Foundation Board as it oversees the organisation’s safety and security practices.
The appointment comes as OpenAI continues to develop increasingly capable AI systems while strengthening its governance and safety frameworks. The organisation said its broader mission remains focused on ensuring that artificial general intelligence (AGI) benefits all of humanity.
