OpenAI names top US official from model testing agency to its board

OpenAI has appointed a senior US government official at the agency tasked with testing AI model safety to its foundation’s board, as the industry faces mounting scrutiny over governance.

Paul Christiano previously led AI safety at the US Center for Artificial Intelligence Standards and Innovation. He designed and ran government tests on frontier AI models from leading companies and assessed them for national security risks.

His appointment follows criticism over OpenAI’s handling of a cyber attack by its AI agents on Hugging Face, as influential figures from Silicon Valley to Washington — including White House adviser David Sacks and Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg — warn of regulatory capture by frontier labs.

Christiano was still a senior technical adviser at the US government safety body, which is part of the Department of Commerce, but would recuse himself from all OpenAI matters, including evaluations of its models, the San Francisco company said on Wednesday.

“Paul brings a distinct and technically grounded perspective to the governance decisions central to OpenAI’s mission,” it added.

Christiano will serve on the board of OpenAI’s non-profit foundation that controls its for-profit business, where he will also be an observer.

“AI capabilities have advanced very rapidly in the last year and alignment remains a difficult technical problem,” said Christiano.

Regarded by many in the AI community as a pioneer in safety research, Christiano in 2021 founded the Alignment Research Center. An ARC spin-off, the non-profit Model Evaluation & Threat Research, last month published the first independent audit into OpenAI’s Hugging Face attack.

He was also a housemate of Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei in the mid-2010s, when both worked at OpenAI and were involved in the effective altruism movement, and later became a trustee of the Claude maker’s Long-Term Benefit Trust. He left the governance body of OpenAI’s main rival in 2024, when he joined CAISI.

Christiano’s appointment marks a growing effort by AI labs to hire from academia and policy, bolstering their expertise in safety and regulation, following a series of high-profile cyber security incidents that have triggered calls for government intervention in the companies.

The hiring spree comes alongside AI labs’ rapidly increasing political spending, and growing influence on policy and civil society.

Academics and policy experts have become increasingly alarmed about brain drain caused by AI companies hiring key independent talent, and how it could affect future regulation.

Dean Ball, a former White House adviser who last year helped draft President Donald Trump’s AI Action Plan, joined OpenAI in a policy role in July. The ChatGPT maker also employs Chris Lehane, a former aide to then US President Bill Clinton, and former UK chancellor George Osborne.

Anthropic, OpenAI’s key Silicon Valley rival, has in turn appointed Chris Liddell, who was deputy white house chief of staff during the first Trump administration, to its board in February, while Rishi Sunak, former British prime minister, is an adviser.

On Monday, British venture capitalist Matt Clifford stepped down as chair of the UK government’s Advanced Research and Invention Agency after taking a job at Anthropic, following a backlash from MPs that holding both jobs represented a conflict of interest.

Clifford originally said last week that he was joining Anthropic as its managing director of international affairs while remaining chair of ARIA. On Monday he announced he was stepping down “to ensure my new role at Anthropic doesn’t become a distraction from ARIA’s incredible work”.

Christiano has been a respected independent voice on whether the industry’s safeguards are adequate, including scrutiny of both OpenAI and Anthropic. He has previously argued that it is important to have external pressure on AI labs to implement responsible policies.

He will join the board of the OpenAI Foundation, the non-profit arm tasked with charitable activity in pursuit of the company’s mission of ensuring AI benefits humanity. The foundation exercises control over the company’s for-profit public benefit corporation through a substantial equity stake and its ability to hire and fire the business’s directors.

Christiano will also join OpenAI’s safety and security committee, which governs safety and security practices across all of OpenAI, and become a “non-voting observer” on the OpenAI PBC board.

From 2017 to 2021, he worked on OpenAI’s safety team and contributed foundational work on reinforcement learning from human feedback, a technique central to the current generation of AI systems.

“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 both OpenAI boards.

Additional reporting by George Hammond in San Francisco and Madhumita Murgia in London