OpenAI announced on September 9, 2026 the appointment of Paul Christiano to the OpenAI Foundation Board, where he will join the board’s Safety and Security Committee. Christiano will also serve as a non-voting observer on the board of OpenAI Group PBC.
Safety and Security Committee Role
Christiano will work on the Safety and Security Committee alongside its chair, Zico Kolter. The committee provides governance over safety and security practices across all of OpenAI, including OpenAI Group PBC. A footnote to the announcement states that, as a Senior Technical Advisor, Christiano will recuse himself from all OpenAI-related matters as well as all model evaluations.
Bret Taylor, chair of the OpenAI Foundation and OpenAI Group PBC boards, said Christiano’s experience working on frontier AI safety and standards in government, together with his technical judgment, will strengthen the board’s oversight and the committee’s work as OpenAI continues to develop and deploy frontier AI. “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,” Taylor said.
Government and Alignment Research Background
Christiano is a Senior Tech Advisor at the Center for AI Standards and Innovation within the National Institute of Standards and Technology, an agency of the U.S. Department of Commerce, with government experience spanning two administrations. During his time at the center and its predecessor, the U.S. AI Safety Institute, he has worked on evaluating frontier AI models, including capabilities with national security implications, and on approaches to mitigating the associated safety and security risks.
Christiano is also the founder of the Alignment Research Center, a nonprofit research organization focused on aligning advanced AI systems with human interests. From 2017 to 2021, he led alignment research at OpenAI and contributed foundational work on reinforcement learning from human feedback.
According to OpenAI, Christiano’s career researching AI alignment reflects a perspective that treats the possibility of catastrophic risks from advanced AI seriously and holds that developers must prepare before systems reach more dangerous levels of capability. The company described him as an independent voice on whether the industry’s safeguards are adequate, and said it believes the Foundation’s governance is stronger with people prepared to challenge prevailing assumptions and help strengthen the evidence, safeguards, and accountability underlying critical decisions.
“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,” Christiano said, adding that he is excited to join the team to help.
Governance Structure From the 2025 Recapitalization
OpenAI said the appointment builds on the governance structure established through its recapitalization in October 2025, including commitments made in connection with reviews conducted over the course of a year by the California Attorney General and the Delaware Attorney General, whose engagement the company said helped strengthen the governance framework.
Under that structure, announced on October 28, 2025 and detailed on OpenAI’s structure page, the nonprofit became the OpenAI Foundation and the for-profit became OpenAI Group PBC, a public benefit corporation required to advance its stated mission and consider the broader interests of all stakeholders. OpenAI was founded in 2015 as a nonprofit with a mission to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity, and it created the for-profit subsidiary in 2019. Through special voting and governance rights held solely by the Foundation, the Foundation appoints all members of the OpenAI Group board and can replace directors at any time.
The structure page lists the Foundation board as independent directors Bret Taylor as chair, Adam D’Angelo, Christiano, Sue Desmond-Hellmann, Zico Kolter, retired U.S. Army General Paul M. Nakasone, Adebayo Ogunlesi, Nicole Seligman, David Vélez, and Robin Vince, along with CEO Sam Altman. Kolter, the Safety and Security Committee’s chair, serves exclusively on the Foundation board and as a non-voting observer to the Group board, while the other current Foundation directors also serve on OpenAI Group’s board. Within one year of the recapitalization, a second Foundation director will transition to serving exclusively on the Foundation board and as a non-voting observer to the Group board.
Foundation Operations and Equity
The announcement describes the OpenAI Foundation as a charitable organization that operates as a separate nonprofit, conducting its own charitable operations while maintaining control of OpenAI Group PBC and holding a significant equity stake in it. The Foundation supports initiatives advancing scientific discovery, strengthening civil society, and building resilience through responsible AI, and its website lists three initial priority programs: Life Sciences and Curing Diseases, AI Resilience, and Civil Society and Philanthropy.
As of the closing of the recapitalization, the Foundation holds a 26% equity stake in OpenAI Group, worth approximately $130 billion based on OpenAI Group’s current valuation, according to the structure page. The Foundation also holds a warrant allowing it to receive additional shares if OpenAI Group reaches a valuation milestone; if OpenAI Group’s share price increases by more than tenfold after 15 years, the Foundation will receive significant additional equity. Microsoft holds roughly 27% of OpenAI Group as of the closing, with the remaining 47% held by current and former employees and investors.
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