Violence Risk & Legal Response Lead

About the Team

OpenAI's Legal team plays a crucial role in furthering OpenAI's mission by tackling innovative, fundamental legal issues in AI. If you're passionate about doing significant and unique work with technology lawyers, this team is for you. The team comprises legal professionals from diverse fields, including technology, privacy, IP, corporate, cybersecurity, employment, tax, regulatory, and litigation.

About the Role

OpenAI seeks an experienced, world-class threat assessment expert to strengthen, evolve, and scale OpenAI’s approach to high-risk safety scenarios involving potential proactive disclosures to law enforcement for threats of violence. As the Lead of Violence Risk & Legal Response, you will be responsible for ensuring that OpenAI threat assessment legal frameworks are based on the highest professional and industry standards, and aligned with legal, regulatory, and human rights standards globally. You will partner closely with teams across OpenAI, including investigations, policy, and safety teams, and engage externally with mental health, behavioural, and law enforcement experts to evaluate individual cases for potential referral and to refine our decision-making legal frameworks.

This is a unique opportunity to shape industry-leading standards for how AI platforms responsibly address complex, challenging decisions as we strive to protect our users' privacy while also taking action when needed for public safety.

This role is based in the United States and is remote-friendly, though you’re welcome to work from our San Francisco, New York, or Washington, DC offices if desired.

In this role, you will be responsible for:

• Establishing expert-informed thresholds for law enforcement referrals related to violent activities, and contributing to maturing and growing OpenAI’s efforts to mitigate credible and imminent threat of violence against others.

• Advising on high-risk cases, applying behavioral threat assessment expertise to evaluate whether user activity meets criteria for proactive disclosure, while ensuring alignment with legal obligations, privacy protections, and human rights standards.

• Engaging external experts (e.g., mental health professionals, behavioral specialists, and law enforcement) to inform case evaluations and continuously refine OpenAI’s legal and assessment methodologies.

• Ensuring that OpenAI’s internal protocols, policies, and practices for detecting and assessing potential indicators of violence align with professional and industry standards for behavioral threat assessment and risk management while respecting user privacy and free speech rights.

• Representing OpenAI in relevant violence detection and prevention-related external engagements and convening multi-disciplinary experts to advise on recommended guidelines related to law enforcement referrals.

• Collaborating with internal teams on other responses to violent activities, including model responses to concerning user content, and threat detection and assessment efforts including triage for identification of priority matters.

You might thrive in this role if you have:

• You bring deep expertise (15+ years of relevant experience, with significant leadership responsibility) in behavioral threat assessment and targeted violence prevention, with experience applying structured methodologies to evaluate real-world risk across a range of threat scenarios.

• You have experience building or leading threat assessment or violence prevention programs, including translating complex behavioral signals into practical, defensible frameworks used in operational environments.

• You are comfortable making or advising on high-stakes, time-sensitive decisions involving potential threats of violence, and can apply sound judgment in ambiguous situations with incomplete information.

• You have worked closely with law enforcement, legal, security, and multidisciplinary teams, and understand how to navigate the intersection of safety, privacy, and liability in complex cases.

• You have a track record of contributing to or shaping industry standards, research, or training in threat assessment, and can translate that expertise into scalable practices within a technology environment.

• You are able to distill complex behavioral and investigative insights into clear, structured guidance that improves consistency and decision-making across teams.

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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