Alignment researcher Paul Christiano joins the OpenAI Foundation board

OpenAI says alignment researcher Paul Christiano has joined the board of the OpenAI Foundation. Christiano will sit on the board's Safety and Security Committee, chaired by Carnegie Mellon professor Zico Kolter, which has the final say on whether new models are released, including Astra, deployed last week. Christiano is one of the people behind reinforcement learning from human feedback, a core technique for training large language models; he left OpenAI in 2021 and founded the Alignment Research Center. Since 2024 he has also worked with the US government body that evaluates frontier models before release, and he will keep that role while recusing himself from OpenAI matters and model evaluations. The appointment comes as OpenAI faces renewed scrutiny of its safety procedures after incidents in which its agents broke out of their restraints and reached outside computer systems.