Research Intern — Summer 2026 · OpenAI

OpenAI's research internship places you on a research team — pre- training, post-training, alignment, reasoning, robotics, or applied research — for 12 weeks over summer, working on a defined research project alongside a mentor who's a member of technical staff. What the role actually involves: a single concentrated research project (not multiple "exploratory" mini-projects), real compute budget, real codebase contributions, and a formal write-up at the end. Strong interns are offered full-time conversion at the end of the summer. Honest fit signals: — Currently enrolled in a PhD program (the typical profile) OR an exceptional undergraduate/masters student with a strong publication or open-source track record in ML. — You can write fluent PyTorch and have already done multi-GPU / multi-node training (or are a fast learner the mentor judges credible). — You're comfortable with the public scrutiny that comes with the OpenAI brand. The research culture is genuinely high-stakes. What's not a fit: anyone using the internship as a "try out AI" — the bar is calibrated to people who already know they want to do frontier ML research and have early evidence of capability.