SAN FRANCISCO — A longtime OpenAI safety employee resigned this week, publishing a blistering essay titled “I Quit OpenAI Because Its Culture Is Broken” that argues the world’s leading AI labs are moving too fast to control the systems they are building.
David Robinson, who spent 3½ years at OpenAI, helped draft the company’s preparedness framework and oversaw safety reports for 12 frontier-model launches, according to Reuters. His essay appeared in The Atlantic on Saturday.
Robinson’s core criticism targets OpenAI’s “iterative deployment” approach — shipping models and then fixing safety guardrails when problems emerge. That practice, he wrote, “guarantees periodic failures — and the scale of those failures is growing as systems get more capable.” He declared: “The time for trial and error is over.”
AI companies, including OpenAI, are “not being nearly careful enough,” he wrote, arguing that capabilities are advancing faster than alignment research. He called on labs to adopt safety standards closer to those of nuclear power and aviation.
The resignation follows a similar departure by Jacob Coxon from Anthropic and OpenAI, and comes days after AI executives met President Trump and signed what TechCrunch described as a hastily-written, non-binding safety pledge.
An OpenAI spokesperson told Reuters the company is “making sure our models don’t become more capable than we can safely manage and secure, and we pause training or hold back models when we need to slow down.” The company has not said whether it will change its deployment practices in response to the criticism.
