Policy Research Scientist, Geopolitics

About the Team

The Policy Research team at OpenAI is responsible for understanding our company’s current and potential impact on the world, and using that understanding to recommend the best possible policies at OpenAI and elsewhere (“policies” are defined broadly to include laws, safety requirements, industry norms, etc.). Team members have backgrounds in a wide variety of disciplines, including computer science and engineering, law, philosophy, economics, political science, and more, and we use a wide variety of quantitative and qualitative methods to measure, forecast, and analyze OpenAI’s impacts.

About the Role

The ideal candidate is someone who brings subject matter expertise in emerging technologies and international security. You’ll be excited to collaborate on and investigate deeply important topics of immediate relevance to OpenAI decision-making.

The RS will help the team identify global shifts that influence the development and deployment of AI, analyze how AI capabilities impact international stability and humanitarian goals, and build solutions that encourage global cooperation on AI.

A researcher in this role will have the remit to conduct and publish research and the latitude to collaborate with relevant external scholars.

The successful candidate will be self-directed, a strong analytical problems solver, someone who enjoys asking foundational research questions and using creative research design, and an effective communicator who can engage broad audiences with their research.

Research questions might include:

• How can we best inform and prepare the world for advanced AI capabilities?
• How might different geopolitical actors anticipate and react to our developments?
• What confidence-building mechanisms should we leverage to encourage trust and transparency between political actors?
• What lessons can we apply from non-proliferation regimes to the development and monitoring of AGI?

Representative responsibilities:

• Collaborate with other team members to push the geopolitics research agenda
• Own and pursue a research agenda aimed at understanding the potential and actual impacts of AI systems
• Understand and communicate potential harms and benefits to decision-makers at OpenAI
• Develop tangible policy solutions for improving the safety of our models

We seek candidates with the following qualifications:

• Ph.D. or equivalent experience in a relevant area (e.g., sociology, economics, or political science, engineering), or relevant research experience and an established research track record, demonstrated by journal publications and/or conference papers
• Demonstrated practical experience working with  AI policy is an asset
• Technical understanding of and familiarity with recent developments in AI

Application Instructions

Please include examples of your existing writing(s) related to subject matter expertise in emerging technologies and international security (e.g. nonproliferation studies). We ask that you not write new materials for this job application.