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Jan Leike

Jan Leike is an AI alignment researcher who joined Anthropic in May 2024 after leaving OpenAI, where he had co-led the superalignment project with Ilya Sutskever.

AffiliationsGoogle DeepMindOpenAIAnthropic

2Events3Organisations1Works

Overview

Jan Leike is an AI alignment researcher. He joined Anthropic in May 2024 after leaving OpenAI.[1]

Education and early research

He studied computer science at the University of Freiburg. He then earned a PhD in machine learning at the Australian National University under Marcus Hutter.[1]

After a postdoctoral fellowship at the Future of Humanity Institute, he joined DeepMind to work on empirical AI safety with Shane Legg.[1]

He is a co-author, with Paul Christiano, Tom Brown, Miljan Martic, Shane Legg and Dario Amodei, of “Deep reinforcement learning from human preferences”, published in 2017.[2]

Main contributions

He joined OpenAI in 2021 as Head of Alignment. In June 2023 he and Ilya Sutskever began co-leading the superalignment project, which aimed to align superintelligent AI within four years.[1]

Career

He resigned from OpenAI in May 2024. In his resignation he wrote that “safety culture and processes have taken a backseat to shiny products”.[1]

He then joined Anthropic.[1]

Recognition

He was named to TIME's 100 Most Influential People in AI in 2023 and again in 2024.[1]

CapabilitiesLarge language models

Governance & standardsSafety & governance

HistoryResearch history

Career timeline

4
  1. 2010
    • Google DeepMind Worked at

      A London-headquartered AI research organisation formed in 2023 by merging DeepMind with Google's Brain team, known for AlphaGo, AlphaFold and the Gemini model family.

  2. 2017
    • Deep reinforcement learning from human preferences Contributed to

      A 2017 paper showing that an AI agent can learn a task from short human comparisons instead of a hand-written reward. The method, reinforcement learning from human feedback, later became central to training chat assistants.

  3. 2021
    • OpenAI Worked at 2021–2024

      OpenAI is a San Francisco AI research and deployment company founded in 2015 as a nonprofit. It makes the GPT model family and ChatGPT and filed confidentially for an IPO in June 2026.

  4. 2024
    • Anthropic Worked at 2024–

      Anthropic is an AI safety and research company founded in January 2021 by former OpenAI employees. It develops the Claude models and products, and its Responsible Scaling Policy sets out safety levels for its models.

Worked at3

Google DeepMind–2021OpenAI2021–2024Anthropic2024–

20241

  1. DepartureOpenAI dissolves the Superalignment team after Sutskever and Leike exit

    In May 2024 OpenAI's chief scientist Ilya Sutskever left the company, followed days later by Superalignment co-leader Jan Leike; OpenAI then disbanded the team, and Leike publicly said safety had "taken a backseat to shiny products".

20231

  1. MilestoneOpenAI announces its Superalignment team

    In July 2023 OpenAI created a team co-led by Ilya Sutskever and Jan Leike to solve superintelligence alignment within four years, committing 20% of its compute and proposing AI systems to help supervise AI.

Contributed to1

Notes and sources

  1. Jan Leikehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Leike
  2. Deep reinforcement learning from human preferenceshttps://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03741

Cite this page: Jan Leike. TellWorld, https://www.tellworld.net/people/jan-leike. Updated 2026-11-08