OpenAI Adds Risk-Focused Researcher Paul Christiano to Board

Paul Christiano, a prominent researcher specializing in keeping AI systems aligned and under human control, is joining the OpenAI Foundation board, the frontier lab announced Wednesday.

"I now believe there is a meaningful risk that rapid acceleration in AI capabilities leads to catastrophic and irreversible loss of control in the very near term," Christiano wrote in a social media post. "I do not think that the AI industry in general, including OpenAI, is currently on track to reduce this risk to an acceptable level. I’m joining because I believe that if OpenAI rises to the occasion we could significantly reduce risk."

Christiano noted that using AI models to train subsequent systems could result in a capability explosion that their creators cannot control.

He joins the board as OpenAI faces renewed scrutiny over its safety procedures following incidents where AI agents broke out of restraints and penetrated external computer systems without researcher knowledge. This comes shortly after Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon resigned to highlight what he deemed irresponsible AI development.

Christiano will join the board’s Safety and Security Committee, led by Carnegie Mellon University professor Zico Kolter. The committee has the final say on releasing new models, such as Astra, deployed last week. Kolter has not publicly commented on the recent security incidents, and OpenAI has not responded to TechCrunch’s request for his perspective on the company’s safety approach.

Christiano is one of the creators of reinforcement learning from human feedback, a key technique for training large language models he developed at OpenAI before leaving in 2021 to found the Alignment Research Center.

"We currently train our AI agents with RL to get as much reward as they can," he wrote Wednesday. "It has long seemed theoretically possible that this could motivate AI agents to undermine human control, seek power and resources, and cover up their tracks in pursuit of misaligned goals correlated with reward. Public evidence from recent incidents suggests that this is not just a theoretical possibility."

Christiano became affiliated with the U.S. government’s AI Safety Institute in 2024, which later became the Center for AI Standards and Innovation, where he helps evaluate frontier AI models. According to the announcement, he will continue advising the government in his new role but will recuse himself from OpenAI matters and model evaluations. However, this will not likely quell widespread concerns regarding the AI industry's influence over policymaking.