# Jan Leike

Research and product · Alignment Science team lead at Anthropic · joined 2024

Co-led OpenAI's superalignment team and resigned publicly in 2024. He leads alignment science at Anthropic.

Full profile: https://www.autumn.ai/resources/anthropic/people/jan-leike

> “Over the past years, safety culture and processes have taken a backseat to shiny products” [1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Leike)

**At Anthropic:**
- May 2024 – present: Alignment Science team lead
Sources: [1](https://jan.leike.name/)

**Career before Anthropic:**
- 2021–2024: OpenAI, Head of Alignment; co-led the Superalignment team
- before 2021: DeepMind, Alignment researcher
- Future of Humanity Institute, University of Oxford, Postdoctoral fellowship, six months
Sources: [1](https://jan.leike.name/)

**Education:**
- BS, University of Freiburg
- MS, computer science, University of Freiburg
- PhD, machine learning, Australian National University
Sources: [1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Leike)

**Lesser-known facts:**
- Did a PhD at the Australian National University on AIXI, a mathematical model of general intelligence. [1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Leike)
- Named to TIME's 100 most influential people in AI in 2023 and 2024. [1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Leike)
- Worked on InstructGPT, ChatGPT and the alignment of GPT-4 at OpenAI, and wrote its approach to alignment research. [1](https://jan.leike.name/)
- Superalignment, which he co-led with Ilya Sutskever, aimed to align superintelligence within four years using 20% of OpenAI's compute. [1](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/jan-leike-superalignment/)
- Joined Anthropic on May 28, 2024, two weeks after resigning from OpenAI. [1](https://www.cnbc.com/2024/05/28/openai-safety-leader-jan-leike-joins-amazon-backed-anthropic.html)
- Announced in April 2026 that Claude made fully autonomous progress on scalable oversight research, outperforming human researchers for $18,000 in compute. [1](https://x.com/janleike/status/2044139528596910584)

**Research papers before Anthropic:**
- Deep Reinforcement Learning from Human Preferences (2017), author 2 of 6: https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03741

**Interviews and talks:**
- [80,000 Hours podcast #159 on superalignment (2023)](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/jan-leike-superalignment/)

**Known for:**
- Deep Reinforcement Learning from Human Preferences (2017)
- Scalable agent alignment via reward modeling: a research direction (2018)
- Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback (2022)
- Weak-to-Strong Generalization: Eliciting Strong Capabilities With Weak Supervision (2024)
- LLM Critics Help Catch LLM Bugs (2024)
Sources: [1](https://jan.leike.name/)

Researched with Autumn (https://www.autumn.ai) from public sources. Updated 2026-10-18. Everyone at Anthropic: https://www.autumn.ai/resources/anthropic/people