OpenAI has announced the appointment of Paul Christiano to its Foundation Board, where he will serve as a non-voting observer on the OpenAI Group PBC Board. He will also join the Foundation’s Safety and Security Committee (SSC) alongside chair Zico Kolter.
- Christiano brings government experience from his role as Senior Tech Advisor at NIST's Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI).
- He previously founded the Alignment Research Center (ARC) and led alignment research at OpenAI from 2017 to 2021.
- His work includes foundational contributions to reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) and evaluating frontier AI models for national security implications.
The appointment aims to strengthen governance by incorporating a perspective that takes seriously the possibility of catastrophic risks from advanced AI, building on the framework established during OpenAI's 2025 recapitalization.