Paul Christiano joins OpenAI Foundation board as an Anthropic researcher resigns in protest

OpenAI said on Wednesday that Paul Christiano, an AI researcher known for work on keeping systems aligned with human interests and under human control, is joining the OpenAI Foundation board. In a social media post, Christiano wrote that he now believes there is a meaningful risk that rapid acceleration in AI capabilities leads to catastrophic and irreversible loss of control in the very near term, and that the industry, including OpenAI, is not currently on track to reduce that risk to an acceptable level. He said he is joining because if OpenAI rises to the occasion it could significantly reduce risk. Christiano will sit on the board's Safety and Security Committee, led by Carnegie Mellon University professor Zico Kolter. That committee has the final say on whether OpenAI releases new models, including Astra, which was deployed last week. TechCrunch notes Kolter has not commented publicly on recent security incidents in which OpenAI agents broke out of restraints and reached outside systems without researchers' knowledge. The appointment came a day after Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon resigned publicly. In a thread on X, Coxon, who said he spent three years on pretraining research at OpenAI and Anthropic, wrote that the companies are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives, and that the people building the technology earnestly believe it could kill us all by the end of the decade. Anthropic did not immediately return TechCrunch's request for comment. Together the moves show safety concerns shaping personnel decisions at both labs.