Paul Christiano

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (BS) University of California, Berkeley (PhD) Reinforcement learning from human feedback Paul Christiano is an American researcher in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), with a specific focus on AI alignment, which is the subfield of AI safety research that aims to steer AI systems toward human interests.[1] He is the founder and executive director of the Alignment Research Center (ARC), a nonprofit that develops methods for finding mechanistic explanations of neural network behavior,[2] and serves on the OpenAI Foundation's board and its Safety and Security Committee.[3] Christiano worked at OpenAI from 2017 to 2021, where he led the language model alignment team[4] and became one of the principal architects of reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF).[5][6] He founded ARC in 2021[7] and in 2024 became Head of Safety for the U.S. AI Safety Institute (now the Center for AI Standards and Innovation) inside NIST,[8] before returning to ARC as executive director in August 2026.[2] He was also an initial trustee of Anthropic's Long-Term Benefit Trust.[6][9] In 2023, Christiano was named to the TIME 100 Most Influential People in AI[5][10] and appointed to the advisory board of the UK government's Frontier AI Taskforce.[11]