ByteDance’s Seed forms AI safety team and launches a global hiring drive

ByteDance has built itself an AI safety team. The company’s AI research division, Seed, has set up a dedicated department for safety, alignment, and risk management, and it is now recruiting researchers worldwide. The unit is called the Model-Alignment & Preparedness department. The announcement went out internally around October 13, 2026. Global recruitment followed soon after. What Seed is building The new department will start small. Seed plans to hire an initial group of ten researchers. The team will get access to resources comparable to those of Seed’s cutting-edge model development teams, with long-term investment planned. Yan Lin is leading the department. Lin reports directly to Wu Yonghui, the head of Seed. Open roles are based in three cities: Beijing, Shanghai, and San Jose, California. The research agenda The department’s priorities include: Model behavior specifications. These are the written rules for how a model should act. Safety evaluations. These are the tests that check whether a model actually follows those rules once it is out in the world. Automated red-teaming. Red-teaming means deliberately attacking a system to find its weak spots. Automating it means ...