‘The Stakes Are Incredibly High.’ Two Former OpenAI Employees On the Need for Whistleblower Protections

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman speaks during the Microsoft Build conference at the Seattle Convention Center Summit Building in Seattle, Washington on May 21, 2024.his could be a costly interview for William Saunders. The former safety researcher resigned from OpenAI in February, and—like many other departing employees—signed a non-disparagement agreement in order to keep the right to sell his equity in the company.

The letter follows a spate of high-profile departures from OpenAI, including its chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, who voted to fire Sam Altman in November of last year but was ultimately sidelined from the company as a result. Sutskever has not commented on the events publicly, and his reasons for leaving are unknown. Another senior safety researcher, Jan Leike, quit in May,They aren’t the only ones to quit recently.

But in interviews with TIME, two former OpenAI employees—Kokotajlo, who worked on the company’s governance team, and Saunders, a researcher on the superalignment team—said that even beyond non-disparagement agreements, broadly-defined confidentiality agreements at leading AI labs made it risky for employees to speak publicly about their concerns.

“The AGI labs are not really accountable to anyone,” says Saunders. “Accountability requires that if some organization does something wrong, information about that can be shared. And right now that is not the case.”

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