Abuse Investigator (AI Self-Improvement Risk)

About the Team

OpenAI's mission is to ensure that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. We believe that achieving our goal requires real world deployment and iteratively updating based on what we learn.

The Intelligence and Investigations team supports this by identifying and investigating misuses of our products - especially new and emerging classes of risk. This enables our partner teams to develop data-backed policies and safety mitigations. Precisely understanding how models behave in real-world conditions allows us to safely enable users to build useful things with our products.

About the Role

As an Abuse Investigator focused on AI Self-Autonomy and Agentic Risk on the Intelligence and Investigations team, you will be responsible for identifying and investigating cases where models exhibit autonomous or agentic behavior, including chaining capabilities, acting with increasing independence, or demonstrating patterns that may introduce safety risk. This includes detecting behaviors that are not explicitly intended, understood, or covered by existing safeguards.

This role requires deep domain-specific expertise in identifying, understanding, and mitigating risk from agentic systems, model autonomy, and AI self-improvement signals. You'll need experience investigating complex systems where behavior emerges across multiple steps, tools, or interactions, and the ability to distinguish between normal task execution and concerning patterns such as persistence, workaround behavior, or capability expansion. You'll need a proven ability to navigate ambiguous signals in a rapidly evolving and highly technical environment.

This role is based in our San Francisco office. Investigations may involve reviewing complex or sensitive model behaviors and edge-case outputs, requiring strong judgment and resilience in high-pressure environments.

In this role, you will:

• Review leads, investigate model behavior, and identify cases where systems demonstrate agentic or autonomous patterns that that introduce safety risks

• Detect and analyze behaviors such as multi-step planning, capability chaining, tool use, persistence, and workaround behavior

• Develop signals and tracking strategies to help proactively identify emerging agentic risk patterns across our platform

• Identify gaps in existing safeguards, evaluations, or monitoring systems and propose improvements

• Communicate investigation findings clearly to technical, policy, and leadership stakeholders

• Be someone people enjoy working with and appreciate the opportunity to help others

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Have deep expertise in investigating complex, adversarial, or emergent system behavior, ideally in AI safety, security, cyber, or trust & safety environments

• Have strong familiarity with technical investigations, especially using SQL, Python, or similar tools, in a government, research, or technology setting

• Have experience analyzing multi-step systems, automation, or agentic workflows, and understanding how behaviors emerge across interactions

• Have at least 6 years of experience conducting investigations, threat analysis, or research in complex and ambiguous domains

• Have experience identifying failure modes, unintended behaviors, or system-level risks, particularly in AI or software systems

• Have at least two years of experience helping to develop automated or scalable approaches to detection or investigation

• Experience presenting analytic work in technical, research, or policy settings

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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At OpenAI, we believe artificial intelligence has the potential to help people solve immense global challenges, and we want the upside of AI to be widely shared. Join us in shaping the future of technology.

Compensation Range: $288K - $320K