Part of The OpenAI Safety Reckoning · 9 stories · since Sep 24 · newest 21m ago
OpenAI loses safety lead David Robinson days after firing three researchersProfiles detail Robinson's record as coverage continues
6 Oct 4 3:36 PM · 10d ago · 5 articles · 20 posts · 29 comments · 5 sources · development 6 of 6
Business Insider and other outlets published profiles of Robinson's tenure leading OpenAI's Safety Systems and policy-planning work, as pickup of both the firings and the resignation continued through the following days.
David Robinson Former OpenAI safety-report leadOpenAI AI company at center of storyJasmine Wang, Tomek Korbak, Mikita Balesni Fired OpenAI researchersGeoffrey Irving Former OpenAI chief scientist at UK AI Safety Institute, now at ResolutionJacob Coxon Former Anthropic researcher
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What was reported 1 claim about this development
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first by Business Insider, 10d ago
What people said 24 voices · best of 42 · verbatim
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“My main worry is that the idea is the A.I. can make a smarter A.I. in some way that we’re not going to understand. .. So we’re ending up in a world where .. we’re just going to have to trust what it tells us about how it works or whether it’s aligned.” @nytimes.com
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1791041912 | OpenAI safety leader David Robinson resigns | https://www.businessinsider.com/safety-leader-david-robinson... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49945206 | 0 comments1791065893 | OpenAI safety leader quits, warning AI company's culture is 'broken' | https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/oct/03/openai-sa... |…
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Last week I was called into a meeting with OpenAI's head of safety and told they no longer trust me. A security guard took my badge and walked me out of the building. Then I learned my colleagues @balesni and @j_asminewang had been fired too. Why did OpenAI suddenly stop trusting us? This summer O...
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Insightful Ezra Klein interview with David Robinson who left OpenAI’s safety team over concerns that no AI companies are doing adequate safety work. Nice to hear perspective from someone who came from outside SV. https://www. nytimes.com/2026/10/07/opinion /ezra-klein-podcast-david-robinson.html
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David Robinson, who worked on OpenAI’s safety team, resigned from the company this week. “I believe we need to look deeper than specific rules or new laws. We need to talk about culture,” he writes:
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until they are forced to do so by customers or by lawNeither of those things is ever going to happen. AI is the goose laying the golden eggs; there isn't going to be sufficient political will to significantly regulate it.Consumers like it too much to quit. They don't quit social media either, despite proven present harms; not in large enough…
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New: In a letter to OpenAI board members on Wednesday, three recently fired employees say the company and its competitors should not move forward with work that would decrease AI monitorability. They also claim their firings are “chilling those who remain at OpenAI.”
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“An environment where things like this can happen is no place to grow artificial minds that could be smarter than we are and that might not do what we want them to.” https://www. theatlantic.com/technology/202 6/10/openai-safety-team-resignation/688881/
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TechCrunch AI: OpenAI Safety Exodus Signals Internal Rifts Over AI Ethics Link: https://techcrunch.com/2026/10/03/openai-safety-employee-resigns-claiming-the-companys-culture-is-broken/ | Context:
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OpenAI and other frontier labs won't ever introduce safety-level standards like those used for railways or nuclear plants until they are forced to do so by customers or by law. The reason is simple: safety is expensive, and if safety is introduced properly, development is no longer mainly about how to implement feature A. Instead, it becomes much…
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Two other safety researchers and I were fired from OpenAI last week. We wrote this letter to leadership. I believe we were fired for prioritizing safety over the near-term interests of OpenAI as a corporation.
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https://www. wsj.com/tech/ai/fired-openai-r esearchers-ask-company-to-preserve-visibility-into-ai-reasoning-987c8c94?st=SSs38V&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
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Software systems have bugs. They always do. This includes security bugs: vulnerabilities in code that could be exploited. In any software project I’ve worked on this is always true. We never finish fixing security bugs. That means vulnerabilities are always present even if hard to notice. AI tools are amazing at finding hard to notice bugs. It…
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Aligned/unaligned is counting angels on the head of the pin.Bureaucracies and systems of power that literally rule us, that control our most dangerous weapons and a huge part of what we see every day are largely unaligned with the goals of people, societies, maybe entire human species as a whole. This is clearly evidenced by millions of deaths and…
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As for other industries where safety is mandated by law, law itself came only after many disastrous events.What's truly original here - and suspicious if you ask me - is that said industry asks for regulation. Did mining, tobacco or airplanes companies ask for regulation? No, not even after many people died.So some american AI companies are like…
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Actually you are wrong. They are only waiting for them to get to the point where they can't push LLMs any further via training and then lobby Governments to introduce safety regulations that they'll adhere to, thereby using safety itself as a moat to block competition (including open weights from other countries, notably China). That's exactly why…
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I had this thought a while ago, the more complex the systems get, the more reliant on "smart" people powerful institutions will becomeAnd the less their input is valued, the less that pool of smart individual will want to participateSo powerful institutions will end up relying more and more on having to trust these automated systems that they…
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quite interesting to see the public discourse over ethics of the current buzzword. meanwhile people have been happily getting mad rich through software companies making money through addiction, ads and surveillance throughout the last couple decades.also, all of this seems like crying wolf as usual, which won't help for when we finally get there…
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> ...Hugging Face incident, OpenAI let a swarm of agents out by mistake...>An environment where things like this can happen is no place to grow artificial minds that could be smarter than we are and that might not do what we want them to.I think it's good for semi ethical companies to test out things going wrong to see what happens before the…
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I think railway safety and nuclear safety are fundamentally different from AI Safety.I would bet the vast majority of the world population would agree that they don't want to see trains derail or nuclear plants meltdown.I don't think there is that sort of agreement when it comes to the question of AI Safety.Is generating the founding fathers of…
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It kinda looks more like safety will be a segmented product. They're already placing safety on the general public.I think the conceptualization vs implementation is what you're arguing with. They won't put safety on anything they give to the military industrial complex. They'll sell them whatever they want, whenever they want, because those…
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> Before AI starts thinking circles around us—a possibility that I believe could happen soon—...What the hell is that even supposed to mean?Sorry but this piece read like total fluff to me, not a single compelling point – just pure fear mongering.At this point we gotta be more wary of possibly mere attention seekers leaving those companies..
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7,250 humans die every single hour, every day.25,000 people starve to death every single day.The status quo, and deceleration of progress, have massive costs in lives and suffering.I'll need more than desperate attempts at being relevant to convince me we should slow down.
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I feel like I'm missing something. They seem to not even have basic observability and online evals. It's not that hard to look at a trace and answer the question "is it writing code for that makes an external network request?" with reasonable accuracy.
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