Model Policy

Details

The Safety Systems team works to build and deploy safe AGI. The Model Policy team aligns model behavior with human values and norms by iterating on policy taxonomies, defining evaluation criteria, and developing policies for foundational models.

This role focuses on defining how OpenAI models should behave in high-risk or ambiguous contexts, including agentic systems, multimodal systems, user safety, privacy, and emerging risk domains. The position involves collaborating with research, engineering, product, preparedness, and operations teams to create technically grounded, measurable policies that address real-world risks.

Responsibilities

• Design and maintain model policies across safety-relevant domains, including dual-use, agentic, and emerging frontier-risk areas.
• Translate risk and harm models into behavioral specifications, evaluation criteria, grading guidance, and system-level safeguards.
• Define boundaries between beneficial AI use and assistance that could materially enable harm, exploitation, misuse, or unsafe outcomes.
• Build policy artifacts supporting model training, evaluation, and deployment.
• Partner with safety researchers, engineers, product teams, and other stakeholders to operationalize policy into scalable model behavior and measurable safeguards.
• Use red-teaming results, deployment data, model failures, over-refusals, under-refusals, and ambiguous edge cases to improve policy and evaluation quality.
• Identify emerging capability areas where frontier AI systems could create new safety challenges or lower barriers to harm.
• Study real-world deployments to identify where model behavior succeeds, fails, or drifts from the intended safety posture.
• Combine longer-horizon safety research with hands-on launch and deployment work.
• Contribute to system cards, safety reports, policy documentation, launch reviews, and external communications concerning model safety and risk mitigation.
• Design and run human data campaigns, including gold-set construction, labeling guidance, calibration, adjudication, and evaluation coverage analysis.

Requirements

• Strong judgment regarding how advanced AI systems may affect real-world risk, particularly in ambiguous, fast-moving, or high-impact areas.
• Experience building or applying policies, taxonomies, harm models, threat models, or risk frameworks for complex technical, social, or adversarial systems.
• Ability to work across unfamiliar domains while recognizing when expert input is needed.
• Ability to turn ambiguous questions into structured policy frameworks, evaluation criteria, operational guidance, and enforceable model behavior.
• Comfort using empirical evidence such as evaluations, red-teaming results, deployment observations, and model failure modes to inform policy decisions.
• Systems-level thinking across policy, data, graders, classifiers, training, deployment safeguards, measurement, monitoring, and escalation workflows.
• Technical judgment regarding what model behavior can realistically be trained, measured, evaluated, and enforced at scale.
• Ability to collaborate across research, engineering, product, policy, domain expert, and operations teams.
• Clear writing about complex trade-offs involving safety, user value, and implementation constraints.
• A pragmatic approach to reducing real-world risk while preserving legitimate and beneficial uses of AI.
• Comfort working in fast-paced, collaborative research environments with shifting priorities.
• Attention to implementation details, empirical results, and what can actually be trained or measured.

Workplace And Location

The role is based in the San Francisco office and uses a hybrid model: three days in the office per week, with optional work from home on Thursdays and Fridays. OpenAI offers relocation support to new employees.

Benefits

• Medical, dental, and vision insurance, with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts.
• Pre-tax accounts for health, dependent care, and commuter expenses.
• 401(k) retirement plan with employer match.
• Paid parental, medical, and caregiver leave.
• Paid time off, paid company holidays, office closures, and paid sick or safe time as required by applicable law.
• Mental health and wellness support.
• Employer-paid basic life and disability coverage.
• Annual learning and development stipend.
• Daily office meals and eligible meal delivery credits.
• Relocation support for eligible employees.
• Equity, performance-related bonuses for eligible employees, and additional taxable fringe benefits may be provided.