OpenAI safety employee resigns, claiming the company’s ‘culture is broken’

Given the increased risk, Robinson argued that frontier AI companies need to start operating “like nuclear-power plants or busy airports, with layers of redundancy and careful, time-consuming planning, so that the occasional and inevitable human error does not open a door to disaster.” 

But Robinson said that in his time at OpenAI, he “never encountered a colleague who had experience making airplanes fly safely or nuclear reactors run without melting down, or helping the financial system grow without collapsing.”

In response to Robinson’s essay, OpenAI spokesperson Drew Pusateri said the company continues to improve its safety measures.

“We’re making sure our models don’t become more capable than we can safely manage and secure, and we pause training or hold back models when we need to slow down,” Pusateri said in a statement. “We’re making significant changes to strengthen security in our research and testing environments, train models to not just complete tasks but do so responsibly, expand our work with third-party evaluators, and improve real-time monitoring so we can detect and respond to concerning behavior earlier in the training process.”

Beyond calling for changes in OpenAI’s culture, Robinson also said it’s time to ask bigger questions about alignment — something that he admitted could sound “touchy-feely,” but he said it’s critical as companies’ current “measures of how well” AI systems “match human values are coarse.”

“The smarter the industry lets models grow while these problems remain unsolved, the more dangerous our situation becomes,” he said.

Robinson’s departure was first reported by Business Insider. In his essay, he also acknowledged that he’s following an apparently a common step in the AI whistleblower playbook: He’s hired a PR firm. But he insisted, “The decision to speak out is mine alone.” 

“Perhaps I should have stayed and fought for fundamental shifts in our staffing and culture, but in practice, my colleagues and I were so busy sprinting that we seldom had the chance to consider big changes, much less to actually make them,” Robinson said. “That’s why I concluded that stronger incentives for safety — coming from outside the company — are a big part of getting this right.”