On 2026-09-09, OpenAI announced that it has appointed Paul Christiano to the Board of the OpenAI Foundation. Mr. Christiano will also join the Safety and Security Committee, which oversees OpenAI's safety measures, and will participate in the Board of the for-profit OpenAI Group as an observer without voting rights.

Mr. Christiano is the founder of the Alignment Research Center and led alignment research at OpenAI from 2017 to 2021. Alignment refers to the technology used to align advanced AI systems with human interests. He has also been involved in research that forms the foundation of reinforcement learning from human feedback, a method where models learn from human preferences.

Upon his appointment, Mr. Christiano mentioned that the rapid acceleration of AI capabilities poses specific risks of catastrophic and irreversible loss of control within a short period. He further estimated the risks as 4% over the next year and 15% over three years, expressing the view that the AI industry as a whole, including OpenAI, is currently not on a path to reducing these risks to acceptable levels.

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