OpenAI has announced the appointment of Paul Christiano to the board of OpenAI Foundation. The company said he will also attend OpenAI Group PBC board meetings as a non-voting observer.
Christiano will also join the foundation’s Safety Committee, where he will work with committee chair Zico Kolter. The committee oversees safety practices across all OpenAI units, including OpenAI Group PBC.
Christiano currently serves as a senior technical adviser at the Center for AI Standards and Innovation at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, part of the US Department of Commerce. His government work has spanned two presidential terms and has focused on evaluating frontier AI models, including from a national security perspective, as well as developing risk-mitigation approaches.
He is also the founder of the nonprofit Alignment Research Center, which studies how to align advanced artificial intelligence systems with human interests. From 2017 to 2021, he led AI alignment research at OpenAI and played a foundational role in developing reinforcement learning from human feedback.
Bret Taylor, chair of the boards of OpenAI Foundation and OpenAI Group PBC, said Christiano helped shape the field of AI alignment through rigorous research focused on the toughest questions raised by increasingly powerful systems.
Christiano said AI capabilities have advanced extremely quickly over the past year, while alignment remains a difficult technical problem. In his view, that makes the Safety Committee’s responsibilities more important and more challenging than ever.
OpenAI added that the appointment follows the company’s new governance structure formed during its recapitalization in October 2025. That process also included commitments tied to reviews by the attorneys general of California and Delaware.
