Program Officer, AI Model Safety

About OpenAI Foundation: AI is already changing how people work, learn, and access care. It has the potential to unlock extraordinary benefits—faster medical breakthroughs, accelerated scientific discovery, more personalized services in healthcare and education, new tools for creativity and invention, higher productivity and economic growth, improved public services like transportation systems, and more. The Foundation aims to enable the use of AI to solve humanity’s hardest problems, transform capabilities, and deliver real benefits while preparing for new challenges and helping society become resilient as AI advances. Over the next year, the Foundation expects to invest at least $1 billion across life sciences, curing diseases, jobs and economic impact, AI resilience, and community programs.

About The Team

AI Resilience helps society absorb, adapt to, and benefit from increasingly capable AI systems, with work across biosecurity, model safety, cybersecurity, children and youth, and the future of the economy. Within AI Resilience, the AI Model Safety program focuses on making AI systems safer by default through independent testing and evaluations, stronger industry standards, and foundational research to interpret, align, and control models.

About The Role

We are looking for a founding grantmaker for the Foundation's AI Model Safety program. This role requires deep technical fluency in how frontier models are evaluated, audited, and made safer, along with the ability to translate that expertise into a grant portfolio and a stronger field. You will manage grantmaking end-to-end, from sourcing opportunities to distributing resources, and proactively identify critical projects and organizations to build. This is an early, zero-to-one role with significant independence, reporting to the Director of AI Resources.

Responsibilities

• Run the program's grantmaking across domains (independent testing and evaluations, industry standards, foundational safety research, AI control, and other new ideas) from sourcing through investigation to resource distribution.
• Conduct grant investigations and make recommendations to the board.
• Proactively identify the most important projects and organizations that need to exist, scope priority projects, find or develop founders, and build new initiatives.
• Work with the AI Resources team to route AI resources to safety grantees and help them absorb it productively.
• Develop the program's strategy with the team lead, identifying funding priorities, ecosystem gaps, and opportunities.
• Build and maintain relationships across the safety ecosystem, including independent safety organizations, AI safety institutes, academic groups, funders, and AI companies' safety teams.

Qualifications

• At least 3 years of experience in AI safety, ideally including hands-on research in model safety or evaluations (e.g., research roles, safety/evals teams, grantmaking, or organization-building).
• Deep, current fluency in AI model safety: evaluations, red-teaming, auditing, interpretability, control, and alignment research.
• Ability to independently assess frontier AI capabilities and risks, with informed views on the most critical risks and ecosystem needs.
• Strategic perspective on AI’s trajectory, risks, and mitigation strategies, with your own takes on capabilities development and safety priorities.
• Proven ability to own ambitious, loosely scoped projects: identifying the right people, convincing them to start new work, and supporting their success.
• Relentless prioritization mindset: evaluating opportunities based on impact, tractability, and neglectedness.
• Strong written and verbal communication: producing compelling, transparent documents that explain reasoning and highlight risks, uncertainties, and downsides.
• Deep mission alignment and excitement to ensure AGI benefits all of humanity.

Skills

It would be great if you also have:

• Grantmaking, VC, or philanthropic experience, especially seeding organizations or sub-fields.
• A research track record in evaluations, interpretability, control, or adjacent technical safety areas.
• Existing relationships across safety organizations, AI safety institutes, and AI company safety teams.

Pay

The annual base salary range for this role is $220,000 to $300,000 USD. Actual base salary will be determined based on relevant experience, skills, expertise, scope of the role, and work location. This range does not include benefits or other eligible compensation.