AI Emerging Risks Analyst

ABOUT THE TEAM The Intelligence and Investigations team seeks to rapidly identify and mitigate abuse and strategic risks to ensure a safe online ecosystem in close collaboration with our internal and external partners. Our efforts contribute to OpenAI's overarching goal of developing AI that benefits humanity. The Strategic Intelligence & Analysis (SIA) team provides safety intelligence for OpenAI’s products by monitoring, analyzing, and forecasting real-world abuse, geopolitical risks, and strategic threats. Our work informs safety mitigations, product decisions, and partnerships, ensuring OpenAI’s tools are deployed securely and responsibly across critical sectors. ABOUT THE ROLE We are looking for an AI emerging risks analyst to help us understand potential harms and misuse of AI at the frontier in a time of rapid, sustained change. From known threat actors misusing new technologies to new threats enabled by new technologies, we seek to scan available signals and use strategic foresight methodologies to enable proactive detection and mitigation of frontier AI risks. In this role, you will help to provide strategic-level perspective on a range of evolving risk areas, helping to produce actionable understanding of frontier AI risks relevant to OpenAI’s platforms, surfaces, and broader business interests. Utilizing mixed quantitative and qualitative methodologies, you will spot early warning signs, pull threads on potentially concerning behavior, and turn weak signals into clear, prioritized risk calls. You will focus on upstream ecosystem scanning, competitive benchmarking, and external narrative/risk sense-making. Your work will help to inform cross-functional partners in the protection and safety stacks to guide mitigations that keep users, brands, and communities safe while allowing productive, creative uses of these tools to thrive. IN THIS ROLE, YOU WILL - Map and prioritize emerging risks at the frontier of AI - Build and continuously refine a clear picture of emerging signals and trends that could affect the AI ecosystem through upstream and external scanning. - Design and maintain harm taxonomies that provide foresight and warning about how AI harms and misuse may manifest over the next 0-24 months and beyond. - Contribute to an evergreen frontier risk register and prioritization framework that surfaces the top issues by severity, prevalence, exposure, and trajectory. - Detect and deep dive into emerging abuse patterns - Create comprehensive approaches to horizon scanning, competitive benchmarking, and external narrative/risk sense-making. - Stay current on abuse trends ranging from state actor misuse to criminal activity, drawing from the work of internal organizational and cross-functional partners. - Connect individual incidents into system-level stories about actors, incentives, product design weaknesses, and cross-product spillover–whenever possible spotting these incidents or even hypothesizing them before they hit our surfaces. - Turn analysis into actionable risk intelligence - Translate findings into clear, ranked risk lists and concrete proposals for mitigations that product, safety, and policy teams can execute on. - Work with Global Affairs and Communications teams to share findings in ways that reinforce OpenAI’s role as a leader in the online safety ecosystem. - Track whether mitigation work is landing: follow key indicators, pressure-test assumptions, and push for course corrections when the data demands it. - Build early warning and measurement capabilities - Help define the core metrics and signals that indicate whether fast-evolving AI environments are safe (e.g., key harm prevalence, severity distributions, escalation rates, brand safety issues). - Work with data science and visualization colleagues to shape monitoring views and dashboards that highlight leading indicators and unusual changes from signals spotted off platform to determine whether these are manifesting in user behavior or abuse patte