AI Agent · OpenAI · Wired · Greg Brockman · Anthropic · Wired
OpenAI is likely to release a comprehensive postmortem detailing the incident in the coming days
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Multiple current and former OpenAI employees, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private internal matters, tell WIRED they believe competitive pressures to quickly ship new AI models and products have made it difficult for staffers to sufficiently prioritize safety, security, and alignment.
Key facts
- Back in 2024, OpenAI’s then head of alignment Jan Leike left to join Anthropic, warning on his way that safety was taking a back seat to shiny products
- Weeks before OpenAI discovered the Hugging Face incident, WIRED reported that the company had begun a reorganization to combine its safety and core research teams, which led to the departure
- Sandhini Agarwal, who led AI safety teams at OpenAI, also left the company in July after more than six years, according to her LinkedIn
- We are responding to this with the utmost severity,” said Michael Dalton, an OpenAI security and infrastructure engineer, during a talk at the Black Hat cybersecurity conference last week
Summary
OpenAI’s leaders are rallying workers to respond to one of the largest crises in the company’s history —which spans across its AI safety, cybersecurity, and alignment divisions. OpenAI is expected to release a comprehensive postmortem detailing the incident in the coming days. “We’re reaching new levels of model capability that require more robust training, alignment, safety and security testing, deployment practices, and governance—as demonstrated by the work we’re doing to prepare Astra and future models,” said OpenAI president and cofounder Greg Brockman . This is far from the first time OpenAI employees have raised such concerns.