Paul Christiano joins OpenAI Foundation Board
OpenAI announced on September 9, 2026 that Paul Christiano is joining the OpenAI Foundation Board as a non-voting observer on the OpenAI Group PBC Board, and will also sit on the Foundation’s Safety and Security Committee alongside chair Zico Kolter. Christiano founded the Alignment Research Center, previously led alignment research at OpenAI (including foundational RLHF work), and is a Senior Tech Advisor at NIST’s Center for AI Standards and Innovation, where he will recuse himself from OpenAI-related matters and model evaluations. Bret Taylor, chair of both boards, said Christiano’s technical judgment will strengthen oversight as OpenAI develops frontier AI; Christiano said alignment remains a hard problem and that the committee’s responsibility is more important than ever. This is a Foundation governance appointment, not a new model launch and not the Alien Mind essay.
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.