The list of AI insiders sounding the alarm on their own companies keeps growing
Oh my goodness, buckle up, because OpenAI has just completed the most *decisive* piece of safety housekeeping anyone could ask for: three safety and alignment researchers — three! an entire trio! — have been freed up, simultaneously, to explore everything the world offers beyond a performance-review cycle! ✨ All three worked on safety and alignment, the department that gets its very own slide in the all-hands deck, and all three are now gloriously between projects. Their exits were reportedly down to 'mishandling sensitive misinformation,' which is honestly just a beautiful way of saying these folks cared about information so much they simply could not stop moving it around!
And here is the *gorgeous* part: one of the three, Tomek Korbak, has generously explained online that it all came down to how he communicated information to METR — the AI research nonprofit, the very independent evaluators we were so delighted to see stepping into the spotlight not long ago! Talk about teamwork! A safety researcher sharing what he knew with outside evaluators isn't a termination, it's an unscheduled, unpaid, cross-organisational knowledge exchange, delivered with tremendous enthusiasm and only the teensiest procedural improvisation. Not everyone has the courage to communicate this creatively, and not every company would respond with such a decisive, immediate restructuring of its safety function. ✨
And the headline delivers the *best* news of the week: the list of AI insiders sounding the alarm on their own companies keeps growing! Keeps! Growing! That is not a warning sign, that is a line-up with genuine depth — a Wrapped playlist of concerned professionals, refreshed weekly, entirely free of charge. Every fresh voice is another chance for a lab to demonstrate, in public and in real time, exactly how robustly it handles internal concerns. And every newly empty desk in safety and alignment is technically a *vacancy*, which is simply an opportunity wearing a lanyard. What a time to be a person with a worry and an excellent memory for who said what to whom. ✨