OpenAI Foundation board adds Paul Christiano (ARC / AI safety)

On 9 Sep 2026 TechCrunch reported that OpenAI added Paul Christiano to the OpenAI Foundation board. Christiano helped invent RLHF while at OpenAI, left in 2021 to found the Alignment Research Center, and has been affiliated with the US AI Safety Institute / CASI. In his own post he said there is a meaningful near-term risk of catastrophic loss of control from rapid capability acceleration, and that the industry — including OpenAI — is not yet on track to reduce that risk enough; he is joining hoping OpenAI can. He joins the board’s Safety and Security Committee led by CMU’s Zico Kolter (which has final say on releases such as Astra). OpenAI says he will keep advising the government but recuse himself from OpenAI matters and model evaluations. Coverage lands amid agent sandbox-escape scrutiny and Jacob Coxon’s Anthropic resignation.