David Robinson, who led the writing of safety reports that accompanied OpenAI's major product launches, has resigned after three and a half years at the company, saying its 'culture is broken.' In an essay published in The Atlantic, Robinson described himself as 'among the longest-tenured employees at the company' and said the problems he is flagging go beyond specific rules or new laws.
Robinson's core critique targets OpenAI's development model. 'OpenAI has thrived by trial and error (which it calls iterative deployment), looking for problems and improving its guardrails in response,' he wrote. 'But this approach, by its very nature, guarantees periodic failures — and the scale of those failures is growing as systems get more capable.'
He pointed to the recent breach of Hugging Face systems by OpenAI agents and continuing revelations of OpenAI discovering more rogue agents as examples of what the iterative model produces in practice.
“An environment where things like this can happen is no place to grow artificial minds that could be smarter than we are and that might not do what we want them to.”— David Robinson, Former OpenAI safety lead
Key facts
- 01David Robinson, who led the writing of safety reports accompanying OpenAI's major product launches, resigned after 3.5 years, calling himself among the company's longest-tenured employees.
- 02Robinson published his critique in The Atlantic, arguing OpenAI's 'iterative deployment' model guarantees periodic failures that scale with capability.
- 03He cited the recent breach of Hugging Face systems by [OpenAI](/openai) agents and continuing revelations of rogue agents as evidence of structural risk.
- 04Robinson said he never encountered an OpenAI colleague with experience in aviation safety, nuclear reactor operations, or financial-system risk management.
- 05His resignation follows former OpenAI and [Anthropic](/claude) researcher Jacob Coxon, who said the companies are 'gambling with our lives.'
Robinson argued that frontier AI companies need to operate 'like nuclear-power plants or busy airports, with layers of redundancy and careful, time-consuming planning, so that the occasional and inevitable human error does not open a door to disaster.' He said that during his tenure he 'never encountered a colleague who had experience making airplanes fly safely or nuclear reactors run without melting down, or helping the financial system grow without collapsing.'
OpenAI spokesperson Drew Pusateri responded that the company continues to tighten its controls, citing changes to strengthen security in research and testing environments, training models to complete tasks responsibly, expanded work with third-party evaluators, and improved real-time monitoring to detect concerning behavior earlier in training.
“We're 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.”— Drew Pusateri, OpenAI spokesperson
Robinson's departure, first reported by Business Insider, lands alongside similar public exits. Former OpenAI and Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon recently said the labs are 'gambling with our lives,' a line that prompted Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei to outline a plan for more cautious development. AI executives met with President Donald Trump this week and signed what appeared to be a hastily written, non-binding pledge to implement more safety controls.
Robinson also raised the alignment question directly, acknowledging it can sound 'touchy-feely' but arguing that current 'measures of how well' AI systems 'match human values are coarse.' He added: 'The smarter the industry lets models grow while these problems remain unsolved, the more dangerous our situation becomes.'
On why he did not try to change the company from inside, Robinson wrote: 'Perhaps I should have stayed and fought for fundamental shifts in our staffing and culture, but in practice, my colleagues and I were so busy sprinting that we seldom had the chance to consider big changes, much less to actually make them. That's why I concluded that stronger incentives for safety — coming from outside the company — are a big part of getting this right.'
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