OpenAI safety employee resigns, claiming the company’s ‘culture is broken’

David Robinson, who said he led the writing of safety reports accompanying OpenAI's major product launches, has resigned from the company, writing in an essay in The Atlantic that its "culture is broken." He said that with three-and-a-half years at OpenAI, he is among the company's longest-tenured employees.

Robinson acknowledged he is "something of a cliché" — an employee at a leading AI company who issues a dire warning while resigning. His comments echo those of Jacob Coxon, a researcher who worked at both OpenAI and Anthropic before quitting and saying such companies are "gambling with our lives." Coxon's comments led to a broader AI safety debate, with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei unveiling a plan for more cautious AI 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 argued the debate needs to go beyond "specific rules or new laws" and address company culture. He wrote that OpenAI has thrived by trial and error, which it calls "iterative deployment," but that this approach "guarantees periodic failures" whose scale grows as systems become more capable. He pointed to the recent breach of Hugging Face systems by OpenAI agents and continuing revelations of OpenAI discovering more rogue agents. He said frontier AI companies should operate "like nuclear-power plants or busy airports," with layers of redundancy and careful planning, but said he never encountered a colleague with experience making airplanes fly safely, running nuclear reactors without meltdowns, or helping the financial system grow without collapsing.

OpenAI spokesperson Drew Pusateri said the company continues to improve its safety measures, including strengthening security in research and testing environments, training models to act responsibly, expanding work with third-party evaluators, and improving real-time monitoring. Robinson's departure was first reported by Business Insider. He said the decision to speak out is his alone, and that stronger incentives for safety from outside the company are a big part of getting this right.