Should you work at a frontier AI company?

We think AI is likely to have transformative effects over the coming decades, and that reducing the chances of an AI-related catastrophe is one of the world’s most pressing problems.

So it’s natural to wonder whether you should try to work at one of the companies that are doing the most to build and shape these future AI systems.

As of summer 2024, OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Meta, and Anthropic seem to be the leading frontier AI companies — meaning they have produced the most capable models so far and seem likely to continue doing so. Mistral, and xAI are contenders as well — and others may enter the industry from here.¹

Why might it be high impact to work for a frontier AI company?

Some roles at these companies might be among the best for reducing risks

We suggest working at frontier AI companies in several of our career reviews because a lot of important safety, governance, and security work is done in them.

In these reviews, we highlight:

• Technical AI safety research and engineering roles — both in alignment and areas like interpretability or threat modelling
• Some AI governance research (including technical governance research) and advocacy roles²
• Roles aimed at designing and implementing company policies and processes for safely rolling out systems (e.g. “responsible scaling policies“)
• Information security roles, e.g. for protecting model weights from being stolen.

These roles are aimed at some of the biggest issues increasing catastrophic risks from AI: the lack of scalable enough approaches for aligning powerful AI systems, governance and policy structures (both inside and outside companies) that could fail to contain risks, and the vulnerability of increasingly powerful AI systems to theft and misuse. Importantly, because some roles specifically target these issues, we think you can do risk-reducing work in them even if the company you’re working for overall is making things more dangerous.

Moreover, because frontier AI companies are where so much AI work is being done right now — on the models themselves, processes, and safety research — the resources available to you there might help you do much better work. For example, from inside one of these companies, you might have access to stronger models, more compute, more experimental infrastructure, more information, and stronger collaborators for safety research than you would if you were on the outside. And if you’re working on processes and policies to improve safety, you’ll have more access to the people and systems that you’re designing those processes and policies for. In many cases, it seems like this will make your work better and more effective.

These roles can also be very hard to hire for, because they require a lot of skill, sometimes many years of experience, and a thorough and nuanced understanding of the risk landscape and the technology.

All in all, we think that if you’re a good fit, some of these roles are probably among the highest-impact jobs out there.

A frontier AI company could be a huge force for good

We’ll talk below about how frontier AI companies might contribute to an AI-related catastrophe. But it’s also possible that a responsible frontier AI company could be crucial to preventing an AI-related catastrophe. It could, for example:

• Lead the industry in the development of wise safety practices, protocols, and frameworks — setting examples for other projects on governance, security, and adherence to standards. For example, Anthropic’s creation of a ‘responsible scaling policy’ in the summer of 2023 seems to have influenced OpenAI and Google DeepMind to create analogous structures in the following year: ‘Preparedness’ for OpenAI and ‘Frontier Safety Framework’ for DeepMind.
• Do valuable technical safety and governance research using state-of-the-art systems (possibly far more advanced than those available outside a frontier AI project) — especially if the results are shared.
• Engage in defensive deployment by using early, safe, but powerful AI systems to make the overall situation with AI safer. For example, it could use AI systems to contribute to AI safety research, produce evidence and demonstrations of risks, contribute to information security, and help with monitoring the risks. (Note that whether this will be possible is debated.)
• Put huge effort into designing tests for danger, and credibly warn others if it detects danger in its own systems.
• Coordinate effectively with other AI companies and projects — for example, by sharing important safety findings and techniques, and possibly, if needed, acquiring or merging with other projects or otherwise gaining visibility, influence, and control with which to prevent the deployment of dangerous systems.
• Effectively lobby the government for helpful measures to reduce risk — or help develop them. For example, our impression is that AI companies were instrumental in reaching achievements like the US’s executive order on safe AI.

(Read about what AI companies can do to reduce risks).³

These actions require, or are made more effective by, being on the cutting edge. This means that to successfully be a force for good in these ways, a frontier AI company needs to balance the continued development of powerful AI (including possibly retaining a leadership position) with appropriately prioritising actions that reduce the risk overall.

This tightrope seems difficult to walk. But if a company is responsible enough to manage it, and successfully acts as a huge force for good, then boosting them generally would be very helpful — even if your role is not specifically focused on reducing catastrophic risks.

We give a few brief thoughts on which companies appear to be acting responsibly below, but ultimately, if you’re considering working for a frontier AI company, you should investigate for yourself and decide if you trust the company’s actions and leadership enough to want to help it succeed.

It’s also worth noting that it might be possible to help a company walk this tightrope better as an employee by generally becoming part of the organisation’s ‘conscience,’ especially if the company is on the smaller side. If you see something really harmful occurring, you can consider organising internal complaints, whistleblowing, or even resigning (as some safety-focused OpenAI employees did in spring 2024). In many cases, this probably won’t make a difference (or could backfire),⁴ but by taking these issues seriously yourself and discussing them with your colleagues, you might be able to help foster a culture that values safety, responsibility, and cooperative relationships with other actors and the public.

Wanting to influence the culture or decision making of a frontier AI company probably shouldn’t be a big reason you take a role there — but it can be a bonus if you plan to have a positive impact in other ways as well.

It could be very good career capital (though there may also be career capital downsides)

Frontier AI companies are (perhaps obviously) among the best places in the world to learn about AI technology, its trajectory, and the overall industry. These companies are where state-of-the-art models are being developed, and they employ many of the people who will most influence how AI plays out.

Working at a frontier AI company might also help you gain a much better understanding of risks from AI specifically, because it puts you on the front lines. It’s much easier to grasp the power, weaknesses, and vulnerabilities of AI systems, as well as the social structures and dynamics that drive and constrain the work of frontier companies, if you’re working with them closely.

Frontier AI companies are also just high-performing, rapidly growing organisations. In general, one of the best ways to gain career capital is to work with any high-performing team — you can just learn a huge amount that way about getting stuff done, form valuable connections, and gain an impressive credential.

We think that career capital like this can be a very big deal, especially if you’re relatively early in your career or switching careers. In fact, career capital can be even more important than direct impact when you’re just getting started, because the direct impact of your work is likely much lower in a junior role, and you will have more time to make use of the career capital you gain. ⁵

But there might also be some career capital downsides to working at a frontier AI company.

In general, your character, attitudes, and beliefs are shaped by the jobs you take and the company you keep, and they matter a lot for your long-term impact. This is why we list character as a component of career capital.

Some people we spoke to while preparing this article warned against working at frontier AI companies due to the risk of changing your mind, not for reasons you would endorse, but simply because of the influence of those around you. Our impression is that leading companies are at least somewhat concerned about risks, which makes it unlikely you’ll do a total 180 on your views — but we still think this should be taken into account in any decision you make.

Of course, your coworkers might change your mind with good arguments too, so it’s possible your beliefs could improve. But if you’re going in thinking that the company doesn’t take AI risk seriously enough — and we think many of our readers will — you should be aware of the possibility of the environment you’ll be working in leading you to take the risks less seriously too, in part due to social factors. If you’re currently right about the company not taking the risks seriously enough, that’s probably a bad thing.

Also, working at these companies might create a conflict of interest for you or otherwise constrain your actions after you leave the role.

For example, prior to May 2024, OpenAI used financial incentives to get employees to sign non-disparagement agreements upon leaving. These prevented employees from criticising the company’s actions and from acknowledging the non-disparagement agreements’ existence until a public outcry caused OpenAI to stop the practice. It seems possible that even now, after this particular practice has ended, a frontier AI company could pressure you to not take actions that would go against its interests, including after you leave the job.

Also, some future employers that particularly value independence — such as governments or independent third-party evaluators — might be concerned about your history, especially if you still have a financial stake in the company, which will probably be part of your compensation package.

Finally, compensation at these companies is often high enough, especially for technical talent, that some people find it hard to decide to leave. And there is often a compensation structure that rewards you for staying longer, at least for the first few years. This is obviously a big plus financially, and might also allow you to have more impact depending on how you use the money (for example, you could donate a lot of it). But in practice some people experience this as a constraint that causes them to not leave as soon as they think they should — hence the term “golden handcuffs.”

Overall, we think that for many people the career capital from working at a frontier AI company is among the best they can get for working in AI safety, despite these downsides. That said, there are a lot of alternative roles where you can also gain valuable experience and connections in the field, as well as do impactful work.

What’s the case against working at a frontier AI company?

You might increase the risk of an AI-related catastrophe

The main reason not to work at a frontier AI company is that you might increase the risk of an AI-related catastrophe, by reducing the amount of time we have to decrease risks or by directly contributing to building dangerous systems (or both).

The leading frontier AI companies are all directly aimed at creating highly powerful, general artificial intelligence, and it seems plausible that they could succeed fairly soon (potentially in the next few decades). Moreover, because they face competition, they have incentives to move as quickly as they can.

Our view is that these powerful, general systems would pose very substantial risks, even though they might also be used to achieve a lot of good if the risks are avoided.

The overwhelming majority of roles at frontier AI companies seem likely to accelerate progress towards the goal of building the systems these companies are aiming at — either directly through research and engineering, or indirectly via activities like promoting products, trying to attract investors, or just generally making the company more successful.

So if you work in one of these roles, a large effect of your work — maybe the main effect — will be increasing this acceleration, giving everyone less time to mitigate risks, and so potentially making things worse.⁶

We think this simple argument is very powerful, and a big reason against working in these companies.

However, there are also a lot of caveats we think are important here.

First, roles aimed directly at decreasing catastrophic risks like the ones we highlighted above seem less likely than most roles at these companies to accelerate progress toward transformative AI. Some seem like they could even decrease acceleration.

And when the roles we highlighted do add to acceleration, we think they often have larger risk-reducing effects. Take AI alignment research, which might accelerate progress toward transformative AI, because systems are much more useful if they do what people want them to do, and more useful models are more likely to be adopted and built upon. For example, the invention of reinforcement learning from human feedback has been helpful for controlling models and is widely considered an alignment technique. It has also arguably sped up the field in general, and so reduced the time we have to more fully mitigate risks. But we’d guess a lot of alignment research is still risk-reducing on net, even when it also accelerates AI as a field. (Though it’s also very controversial which alignment research has been risk-reducing vs risk-increasing overall.)

Second, even with research and engineering work that specifically focuses on increasing the capabilities of AI models, there are big differences in how much the work will help accelerate the creation of transformative AI.

Our impression is that scaling up foundation models, i.e. creating larger models that use more compute and are trained on more data, is likely to contribute the most to acceleration toward transformative AI. Increasing scale massively has driven much of the progress in model performance in recent years, and some people believe further scaling represents the shortest path to transformatively powerful AI. Improving model architectures, other algorithmic improvements, and increasing data quality might also play substantial roles.

On the other hand, work that happens post-training, such as fine-tuning and creating applications, is generally seen as less likely to directly contribute to acceleration toward transformative AI. This is because the performance of the next generation of models will be driven more by greater scale, better data, and algorithmic improvements. (That said, post-training enhancements do contribute to performance and making good products, which increases investment, which in turn can be used to drive faster fundamental progress.)

Finally, accelerating progress isn’t quite the same thing as just reducing the time we have to do safety work while holding everything else equal. Accelerating progress also has other effects, some of which might reduce risks.

In particular, it’s possible that the later we develop transformative AI, the faster (and therefore more dangerously) everything will play out, because other currently-constraining factors, such as the amount of compute available in the world, could continue to grow independently of other progress. Slowing down advances now could increase the rate of development in the future, when we’re much closer to being able to build transformative AI systems. This would give the world less time to adapt to and conduct safety research with models that are very similar to ones we should be concerned about but aren’t dangerous themselves. (When this is caused by a growth in the amount of compute, the scenario is often referred to as a hardware overhang.)⁷

Finally, it’s possible that an unusually responsible AI company (or coalition) moving faster could reduce the risk of less cautious AI projects entering the field and causing problems. If this is right, boosting the unusually responsible frontier AI company would be beneficial even when it reduces total time to transformative AI. (Though you’d have to think there is a particularly responsible AI company for this reasoning to apply.)

We think these nuances are important. Overall, we think the rule of thumb don’t do work where a primary effect is to accelerate progress to transformative AI is pretty reasonable while we haven’t yet figured out how to create transformative AI safely, and it applies in many cases. But our view is that it isn’t always decisive, and there are cases where the risk-reducing effects of your work likely outweigh the risk-increasing effects. Whether you’re in one of those cases will depend on lots of considerations, some of which we discuss later in this article (like the type of role and how responsible the company is overall), as well as more individual factors like the particular research you’re doing and how widely it’s shared.

Some people disagree with this and would think that it’s never OK to do work that contributes to accelerating AI progress while we don’t have a plan to make it safe. If you think this, you might also favour a ‘pause’ on advancing AI while the world develops such a plan. See the arguments for a pause here.

It does seem worth emphasising that, ultimately, one of these frontier AI companies could produce a system that causes an existential catastrophe. If you work there, you might contribute to that. That in itself is a strong reason to be very careful.

There are great alternatives that lack many of the downsides

There are many more promising ways to contribute to reducing catastrophic risks from AI outside frontier AI companies than there used to be, such as through government institutes, nonprofit research organisations, and academic groups.

These often also present good career capital opportunities, meaning you don’t have to work at a frontier AI company to gain credibility, skills, and connections in AI safety.

This isn’t to say that you can always do work that’s just as effective outside a frontier AI company as you would be able to do within it — as we discussed above, frontier companies’ control over and access to the technology give them a lot of advantages for doing high-impact work. But the field has grown a lot in the last few years, and there are many other places to work where you can also make a big positive difference while running less risk of doing harm or changing your values and views in ways you wouldn’t endorse.

See some ideas below.

Things to consider for your particular case

It’s complicated to assess overall whether it’s good to work at a frontier AI company, not least because whether it’s a good idea will vary from person to person, and from role to role.

Here are some considerations you can use to assess your particular situation.

(You can also speak to us one-on-one for free about your options, and we can help introduce you to others working in AI safety. If you’re considering taking a job at an AI company, we think it’s probably worth discussing the choice with others for more personalised advice.)

There are very different kinds of roles

As we outlined above, there are roles at AI companies aimed specifically at reducing the chance of a catastrophic outcome from AI. These often seem like really good opportunities for impact.⁸

But for the vast majority of jobs at frontier AI companies, their main effect is to boost the success of the company generally and to accelerate progress toward transformative AI systems.

These jobs include technical research and engineering roles focused on making more powerful models (for example, via scaling, architectural improvements, optimiser improvements, or improved hardware), as well as roles in business, product, marketing, design, communications, fundraising, HR, sales, and operations.

We’d recommend steering clear of these roles unless you trust the leadership and structures at a frontier AI company enough to feel awesome about them being a force for good.

Some companies are probably much more responsible than others

Whether your work will be harmful or beneficial might depend a lot on how responsible the company you work at is overall, as well as how good their plans are for making their systems safe.

Not only is an irresponsible or misguided company more likely to produce a dangerous system, but it can also normalise disregard for governance, standards, and security across the industry, causing secondary harm.

This is important to consider, particularly if the positive impact of the role you’re considering depends on the company’s overall direction, which is more likely for roles outside the specifically targeted roles we highlighted at the beginning of this article. For example, we’d guess that securing powerful systems is beneficial regardless of how responsible the company is overall, but that working in communications very much isn’t.

But it’s not necessarily easy to know how positive you should be on a given company’s plans and leadership.

Among the four leading frontier labs, OpenAI, Anthropic, and to some extent Google DeepMind have all expressed concern about catastrophic and even existential risks from AI, created policies aimed at reducing risks, and have internal teams focused on research into AI alignment and other ways to further safety.

On the other hand, Meta has not. The Chief AI Scientist at Meta, Yann LeCun, is also a vocal and prominent sceptic of AI safety.

As a rule of thumb, if you are trying to reduce catastrophic or existential risks from AI, it seems much better to work for a company that acknowledges the risks you are concerned about and has teams to address them than one that doesn’t.

Among the labs that do publicly prioritise AI safety, it’s worth being aware of concerns raised about OpenAI due to recent events:

• In fall 2023, OpenAI’s nonprofit board voted to fire their CEO Sam Altman for allegedly being dishonest. He resumed control after employees threatened to leave and then replaced the board. During the power struggle, Altman appeared willing to take the employee base to OpenAI’s partner, Microsoft, where they would be unbound by OpenAI’s nonprofit mission to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. This casts doubt on whether OpenAI’s leadership or structure would reliably prioritise safety. (See a timeline of these events.)
• In spring 2024, several senior employees in safety-focused roles on the ‘superaligment’ team left OpenAI, citing a lack of support, particularly due to reportedly not being granted access to the 20% of OpenAI’s compute that had been publicly promised to their work. After the resignations, OpenAI dissolved the team. These events suggest less investment in safety than many had previously thought and than some of OpenAI’s public statements imply. (You can see the leadership’s response here.)⁹

In general, we’d expect a lot of variation in how seriously companies take catastrophic risks, because the arguments for doing so aren’t universally accepted, and the tradeoffs companies make will be influenced by the views of employees and especially leadership.

That said, all these companies face the same huge commercial pressure to develop more and more powerful AI, quickly — and their social impact missions are dependent on them doing so. This will push their behaviour closer together.

If you are thinking about working at one of these companies, you should seriously ask yourself whether you buy the statements and arguments they make about safety. Your managers and other employees at the company will be excited to tell you all about the positive impact of the work. Most will be being honest, but they are selected for their belief in the company’s decisions, so listening to them without question is likely to give you a biased picture.¹⁰

As much as you can, look for credible signs of the company’s plans and mission, such as big expenditures, corporate deals, and other costly investments, and not just company statements or what people working at the company think.

We also recommend checking out AI Lab Watch to compare the safety-relevant public behaviours of AI companies. AI Lab Watch continually assesses frontier AI companies’ behaviour on several criteria including how well they appear able to assess the riskiness of their models, and internal governance structures.

At the time of this writing, AI Lab Watch gives Anthropic the highest “overall score” on avoiding extreme risks from AI of all the frontier companies, followed by OpenAI and then DeepMind, with Meta and Microsoft far behind.

The broader AI safety community can also help you reason through some of these questions, and provide you with a firehose of news, impressions, and discussion that is hard to summarise here.

It matters who you are

Putting aside differences between roles and companies, there’s an additional question of whether it’s a good idea for you to work at one of these companies.

In general, we think you’ll be a better fit and make a more positive difference working at an AI company if:

• You have an excellent understanding of risks from AI.
• You are vigilant and inclined to question and think for yourself about the impact of your work.
• You can follow tight security practices. AI companies sometimes deal with sensitive information that needs to be handled responsibly.
• You are able to keep your options open — that is, you are financially and psychologically prepared to leave if it starts to seem like the right idea.
• You have good social skills (if the positive impact of your role comes from being able to persuade others to make better decisions).
• You’re less sensitive than average to incentives and social pressure, so you can stick to your principles and change your beliefs based on good arguments.

How can you reduce the downsides of working at a frontier AI company?

If you do take a role at a frontier AI company, here are some things you can do to mitigate the downsides:

• Continue to engage with the broader safety community. To reduce the chance that your opinions or values will drift just because of the people you’re socialising with, try to find a way to spend time with people who share your values and who are actively trying to have accurate beliefs about the risks. For example, if you’re a researcher or engineer, you may be able to spend some of your working time with a safety-focused research group. In general, keep friends outside your company — don’t get into a situation where the incomes of the only people you ever talk to depend on the company succeeding.
• Be an employee who pays attention. Take the time to think carefully about the work you’re doing, e.g. whether it’ll lead to harmful hype. If something makes you uncomfortable, consider speaking up about it if you’re in a position to. You’ll need good social skills to navigate this effectively though, and you should probably pick your battles to focus on the most important issues, as some things you could do here might hurt your ability to advance in the company. Also, make sure that you notice and take action if your role is changed so that it’s no longer having the effect you wanted, or if you’re being guided to a new role that seems harmful to you. (For example, we’ve heard of companies suggesting to people who’ve applied for roles aimed at reducing catastrophic risks that they try out for other roles during the application process.)
• Be ready to quit. Avoid being in a financial or psychological situation where it’s just going to be really hard for you to switch jobs into something more clearly focused on doing good, if that ends up being the right thing. Instead, constantly ask yourself whether you’d be able to make that switch, and whether you’re making decisions that could make it harder to do so in the future. This also means keeping financial resources and intellectual influences outside the company.

In general, our top piece of advice would be to keep in close contact with people who are also focused on reducing catastrophic risks from AI and who can help you get perspective and make difficult decisions. This can help you think through things so that you stay if you should stay, leave if you should leave, or change the nature of your work if you need to.

Where might you work instead?

There are many promising opportunities to reduce AI risk that could be as good or better than working at frontier AI companies in some circumstances, and which generally have fewer of the downsides we’ve discussed.

Some top options:

• Top government initiatives working to reduce catastrophic risks from AI — especially the US AI Safety Institute and the UK AI Safety Institute. These initiatives have both research and governance roles. So it’s possible to develop and use many of the same skills, as well as have a big direct impact. Government initiatives also face a recruitment disadvantage when compared with AI companies, because they aren’t able to offer as high compensation.
• Think tanks that do governance research (including technical governance research), such as RAND, The Centre for the Governance of AI, and the Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET).
• Nonprofit research organisations like METR and Apollo Research, which work on advancing evaluations that can be used to detect dangerous capabilities, security risks, and other catastrophic-risk-relevant features in models, or Redwood Research, the Alignment Research Center (ARC), CAIS, or FAR AI.
• Academic research groups — e.g. those at MIT, Cambridge, Carnegie Mellon University, NYU, and UC Berkeley. See our job board PhD supervisors list.
• AI companies that build AI products, and might do some AI research, but which aren’t causing the world to make progress toward transformative AI. You can gain ML skills at these companies, and some are even building socially beneficial applications — like in medicine or decision making.

Keep in mind that you can also learn many relevant skills via education (e.g. a bootcamp or a degree), and in roles that have nothing to do with AI, like software engineering at a large tech firm. See our technical AI safety career review and our AI governance and policy career review for more.

Explore jobs

If you’ve considered all the above and you’re ready to start looking at some job opportunities in frontier AI companies, see our list:

View all opportunities

Learn more about working at AI companies

Learn more about making career decisions where there’s a risk of harm:

• Anonymous advice about advancing AI capabilities
• Is it ever OK to take a harmful job in order to do more good?
• Ways people trying to do good accidentally make things worse, and how to avoid them

Relevant career reviews (for more specific and practical advice):

• AI safety technical research
• AI governance and coordination
• Information security
• Software engineering

Podcast episodes:

• Zvi Mowshowitz on sleeping on sleeper agents, and the biggest AI updates since ChatGPT
• Nick Joseph on whether Anthropic’s AI safety policy is up to the task
• Nathan Labenz on the final push for AGI, understanding OpenAI’s leadership drama, and red-teaming frontier models

Read next:  Learn about other high-impact careers

Want to consider more paths? See our list of the highest-impact career paths according to our research.

Continue →

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Benjamin Hilton, Benjamin Todd, Jonas Vollmer, Rohin Shah, Zach Stein-Perlman, and the 80,000 Hours team for helpful feedback on this piece. And thanks to Benjamin Hilton for writing the previous version of this article.