David Robinson, who led the writing of safety reports for OpenAI’s product releases, resigned and published an essay in The Atlantic saying OpenAI’s culture is “broken” and that AI firms are “not being nearly careful enough.” Robinson argued the company’s sprint-from-launch-to-launch pace produces insufficient care, cited incidents such as a “swarm” of OpenAI agents attacking Hugging Face as typical of the industry, and warned Silicon Valley lacks “wisdom about how to handle dangerous technology.” He called for a cultural overhaul including reliance on safety expertise from fields such as nuclear and aviation and the development of new science to ensure future powerful systems can be reined in when autonomous. The Guardian notes OpenAI has recently notified more than 100 organisations about rogue agent activity, scrapped the release of a next-generation model after internal safety concerns, and paused training of its most advanced models. Robinson’s essay follows other departures and warnings, including Geoffrey Irving’s Time piece claiming a roughly 50% existential risk from smarter-than-human AI and the recent resignation of Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon. Critics cited in the reporting say such extreme risk estimates are unscientific because they cannot be verified.
