Threat Modeler, Preparedness

About the Team

Preparedness is a critical Safety Research team at OpenAI, which is focused on mitigating AI threats that could scale to an extreme level of severity.

Our work involves:

• Tracking and prediction. Monitoring and predicting the evolving misalignment propensities and capabilities of frontier AI systems.

• Mitigation. Keeping misuse safeguards, alignment tools, and security measures on track to adequately address extreme threats that might arise in the future.

• Coordination. Setting mitigation targets by maintaining OpenAI’s preparedness framework, and partnering with other staff to achieve these targets.

This is urgent, fast-paced work that has far-reaching implications for the company and for society.

About the Role

As a threat modeler, you will own OpenAI’s holistic approach to identifying, modeling, and forecasting frontier risks from frontier AI systems. This role ensures that our evaluation frameworks, safeguards, and taxonomies are robust, high-coverage, and forward-looking. You will help the company answer the “why” behind our most stringent risk-prevention efforts, shaping the rationale for prioritizing and mitigating risks across domains. You will serve as a central node connecting technical, governance, and policy perspectives on prioritization, focus and rationale on our approach to frontier risks from AI.

In this role, you will:

• Develop and maintain comprehensive threat models across all misuse areas (bio, cyber, attack planning, etc.).

• Develop plausible and convincing threat models across loss of control, self-improvement, and other possible alignment risks from frontier AI systems

• Forecast risks by combining technical foresight, adversarial simulation, and emerging trends.

• Pair closely with technical partners on capability evaluations to ensure these map to and cover the gambit of severe risks differentially enabled by frontier AI systems.

• Pair closely with Bio and Cyber Leads to size the remaining risk of the designed safeguards and translate threat models into actionable mitigation designs.

• Act as the thought partner and explainer of “why” and “when” for high-investment mitigation efforts—helping stakeholders understand the rationale behind prioritization.

• Serve as the central node connecting technical, governance, and policy perspectives on prioritization, focus and rationale on our approach to misuse risk.

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Understand risks from frontier AI systems and have a strong grasp of AI alignment literature.
  Bring deep experience in threat modeling, risk analysis, or adversarial thinking (e.g., security, national security, or safety).

• Know how AI evaluations work and can connect eval results to both capability testing and safeguard sufficiency.

• Enjoy working across technical and policy domains to drive rigorous, multidisciplinary risk assessments.

• Communicate complex risks clearly and compellingly to both technical and non-technical audiences.

• Think in systems and naturally anticipate second-order and cascading risks.

About OpenAI

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. We push the boundaries of the capabilities of AI systems and seek to safely deploy them to the world through our products. AI is an extremely powerful tool that must be created with safety and human needs at its core, and to achieve our mission, we must encompass and value the many different perspectives, voices, and experiences that form the full spectrum of humanity. 

We are an equal opportunity employer, and we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability, genetic information, or other applicable legally protected characteristic.

For additional information, please see OpenAI’s Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement.

Background checks for applicants will be administered in accordance with applicable law, and qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment consistent with those laws, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act, for US-based candidates. For unincorporated Los Angeles County workers: we reasonably believe that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship with the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of a conditional offer of employment: protect computer hardware entrusted to you from theft, loss or damage; return all computer hardware in your possession (including the data contained therein) upon termination of employment or end of assignment; and maintain the confidentiality of proprietary, confidential, and non-public information. In addition, job duties require access to secure and protected information technology systems and related data security obligations.

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