OpenAI appoints Paul Christiano to Foundation Board and Safety and Security Committee

OpenAI appointed AI alignment researcher Paul Christiano to its Foundation Board and the Board’s Safety and Security Committee, the company announced on September 9, 2026. He will also serve as a non-voting observer on the board of OpenAI Group PBC.

According to OpenAI, the Safety and Security Committee is a standing committee of the Foundation Board that oversees safety and security practices across the organization, including OpenAI Group PBC. The OpenAI Foundation is a separate nonprofit that controls the PBC and holds a significant equity stake in it, giving the committee oversight across both entities. Separately, DataPhoenix reported on test-environment security breaches disclosed by OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta earlier this year.

OpenAI’s Preparedness Framework, Version 2 assigns final go/no-go decisions on model deployment to OpenAI Leadership, not the Safety and Security Committee itself. The committee can review decisions, demand reports or information, and see deployment processes. The Foundation Board can reverse a leadership decision or require a revised course of action.

DataPhoenix has also covered OpenAI’s wave of departures from its safety and ethics leadership ahead of an expected initial public offering.

“Paul has helped define the field of AI alignment through work that is rigorous and focused on the hardest questions posed by increasingly capable systems,” said Bret Taylor, chair of the OpenAI Foundation and OpenAI Group PBC boards. “His experience working on frontier AI safety and standards in government, together with his technical judgment, will strengthen the Board’s oversight and the Safety and Security Committee’s work as OpenAI continues to develop and deploy frontier AI,” Taylor said, describing OpenAI’s rationale for the appointment.

“AI capabilities have advanced very rapidly in the last year and alignment remains a difficult technical problem, making the Safety and Security Committee’s responsibility more important and more challenging than ever,” Christiano said. “I am excited to join the team to help.”

OpenAI describes Christiano as the founder of the Alignment Research Center. The organization’s team page lists him as executive director, a board member and president. He is also a senior technical adviser at the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Center for AI Standards and Innovation. OpenAI says the role has spanned two U.S. administrations and included evaluating frontier-model capabilities with national-security implications. A January 2026 NIST draft on automated benchmark evaluations credits Christiano, among CAISI and NIST staff, with feedback that informed the document, corroborating his government evaluation work.

OpenAI also credits Christiano with early contributions to reinforcement learning from human feedback. A 2017 OpenAI research release on gathering human feedback lists him as an author of an interface for training AI systems using occasional human input.

In a footnote, OpenAI said that as a senior technical adviser, Christiano will recuse himself from all OpenAI-related matters and all model evaluations.