Paul Christiano
Founder and executive director of the Alignment Research Center
An AI alignment researcher and one of the principal architects of reinforcement learning from human feedback, who founded the Alignment Research Center.
Biography
Paul Christiano is an American researcher in AI alignment, the subfield of AI safety that aims to steer AI systems toward human interests. He won a silver medal at the 2008 International Mathematical Olympiad, graduated in mathematics from MIT in 2012, and completed a PhD at UC Berkeley in 2017.
He worked at OpenAI from 2017 to 2021, where he led the language model alignment team and became one of the principal architects of reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), including the paper Deep Reinforcement Learning from Human Preferences. He founded the Alignment Research Center (ARC) in 2021, became Head of Safety at the US AI Safety Institute inside NIST in 2024, and returned to ARC as executive director in August 2026. He was an initial trustee of Anthropic's Long-Term Benefit Trust and was named to the TIME100 AI list in 2023.
Notable contributions
Developed reinforcement learning from human feedback
Co-authored the 2017 paper Deep Reinforcement Learning from Human Preferences and became one of the principal architects of RLHF.
Founded the Alignment Research Center
Founded ARC in 2021, a nonprofit that develops methods for finding mechanistic explanations of neural network behavior.
Led safety at the US AI Safety Institute
Became Head of Safety for the U.S. AI Safety Institute inside NIST in 2024.
Career history
Researcher, led the language model alignment team
