OpenAI is plagued by safety concerns

OpenAI is a leader in the race to develop AI as intelligent as a human. Yet, employees continue to show up in the press and on podcasts to voice their grave concerns about safety at the $80 billion nonprofit research lab. The latest comes from The Washington Post, where an anonymous source claimed OpenAI rushed through safety tests and celebrated their product before ensuring its safety.

“They planned the launch after-party prior to knowing if it was safe to launch,” an anonymous employee told The Washington Post. “We basically failed at the process.”

Safety issues loom large at OpenAI — and seem to just keep coming. Current and former employees at OpenAI recently signed an open letter demanding better safety and transparency practices from the startup, not long after its safety team was dissolved following the departure of cofounder Ilya Sutskever. Jan Leike, a key OpenAI researcher, resigned shortly after, claiming in a post that “safety culture and processes have taken a backseat to shiny products” at the company.

Safety is core to OpenAI’s charter, with a clause that claims OpenAI will assist other organizations to advance safety if AGI is reached at a competitor, instead of continuing to compete. It claims to be dedicated to solving the safety problems inherent to such a large, complex system. OpenAI even keeps its proprietary models private, rather than open (causing jabs and lawsuits), for the sake of safety. The warnings make it sound as though safety has been deprioritized despite being so paramount to the culture and structure of the company.

“We’re proud of our track record providing the most capable and safest AI systems and believe in our scientific approach to addressing risk,” OpenAI spokesperson Taya Christianson said in a statement to The Verge. “Rigorous debate is critical given the significance of this technology, and we will continue to engage with governments, civil society and other communities around the world in service of our mission.” 

The stakes around safety, according to OpenAI and others studying the emergent technology, are immense. “Current frontier AI development poses urgent and growing risks to national security,” a report commissioned by the US State Department in March said. “The rise of advanced AI and AGI [artificial general intelligence] has the potential to destabilize global security in ways reminiscent of the introduction of nuclear weapons.”

The alarm bells at OpenAI also follow the boardroom coup last year that briefly ousted CEO Sam Altman. The board said he was removed due to a failure to be “consistently candid in his communications,” leading to an investigation that did little to reassure the staff.

OpenAI spokesperson Lindsey Held told the Post the GPT-4o launch “didn’t cut corners” on safety, but another unnamed company representative acknowledged that the safety review timeline was compressed to a single week. We “are rethinking our whole way of doing it,” the anonymous representative told the Post. “This [was] just not the best way to do it.”

In the face of rolling controversies (remember the Her incident?), OpenAI has attempted to quell fears with a few well timed announcements. This week, it announced it is teaming up with Los Alamos National Laboratory to explore how advanced AI models, such as GPT-4o, can safely aid in bioscientific research, and in the same announcement it repeatedly pointed to Los Alamos’s own safety record. The next day, an anonymous spokesperson told Bloomberg that OpenAI created an internal scale to track the progress its large language models are making toward artificial general intelligence.

This week’s safety-focused announcements from OpenAI appear to be defensive window dressing in the face of growing criticism of its safety practices. It’s clear that OpenAI is in the hot seat — but public relations efforts alone won’t suffice to safeguard society. What truly matters is the potential impact on those beyond the Silicon Valley bubble if OpenAI continues to fail to develop AI with strict safety protocols, as those internally claim: the average person doesn’t have a say in the development of privatized-AGI, and yet they have no choice in how protected they’ll be from OpenAI’s creations.

“AI tools can be revolutionary,” FTC chair Lina Khan told Bloomberg in November. But “as of right now,” she said, there are concerns that “the critical inputs of these tools are controlled by a relatively small number of companies.”

If the numerous claims against their safety protocols are accurate, this surely raises serious questions about OpenAI’s fitness for this role as steward of AGI, a role that the organization has essentially assigned to itself. Allowing one group in San Francisco to control potentially society-altering technology is cause for concern, and there’s an urgent demand even within its own ranks for transparency and safety now more than ever.