OpenAI safety leader quits over 'broken' company culture

A safety leader at OpenAI parts ways with the company citing a "broken" culture with warnings that AI firms are not "being nearly careful enough" about developing the technology. Meanwhile, The Wall Street Journal reports that the White House is forming a special task force and has appointed a czar to take point on AI amid calls for industry regulation.

David Robinson, who led the drafting of safety reports that accompanied OpenAI developer's product release, quit his job last week and explains his resignation in The Atlantic magazine.

With three-and-a-half years at OpenAI, Robinson is among its longest-tenured employees, but now he is leaving because the company's "culture is broken."

In the blistering essay, Robinson stresses a deep cultural overhaul is required across cutting-edge AI companies and incidents, such as a swarm of agents attacking the AI startup Hugging Face. These, as he says, are industry-wide norms "given the speed and flexibility with which people operate."

Robinson says he agrees with other staff who recently departed that the firms building this technology "aren't being nearly careful enough," yet, he thinks they need to "look deeper than specific rules or new laws" and talk about culture.

He claims the future depends on wisdom that Silicon Valley lacks: an awareness of "how to handle dangerous technology" and, more fundamentally, "what it means to care for people."

OpenAI's "unimpeded optimism" about solving problems as they arise means periodic safety failures and their scale will grow as systems get more capable, says Robinson.

He proposes two urgent changes, including more reliance on the safety experiences that already exist in other fields, and new science to ensure more capable models will make safe choices.

Separately, US President Donald Trump taps Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton as the administration's new AI czar to chair a White House task force.

The group will be called "Super Intelligence Force," or SI - a term that Trump prefers over AI.

Clayton and his team will have 120 days to examine the technology's risks and opportunities in their reports.

Former White House AI czar David Sacks has said China is their main rival in the race and that America must maintain a leading position.