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

OpenAI 安全员工辞职，称公司“文化已崩坏”

By his own admission, David Robinson is “something of a cliché”: an employee at a leading AI company who issues a dire warning while resigning from their job. In an essay published in The Atlantic, Robinson said he led the writing of safety reports that accompanied OpenAI’s major product launches. He also said that with three-and-a-half years at OpenAI, he is “among the longest-tenured employees at the company.” Now he’s quitting, because in his view, the company’s “culture is broken.”

大卫·罗宾逊（David Robinson）坦言，自己“有点老套”：作为一家领先人工智能公司的员工，在辞职时发出了严厉的警告。在《大西洋月刊》发表的一篇文章中，罗宾逊表示，他曾负责撰写 OpenAI 重大产品发布时的安全报告。他还提到，在 OpenAI 工作了三年半，他属于“公司任职时间最长的员工之一”。如今他选择离职，因为在他看来，这家公司的“文化已经崩坏”。

In some ways, Robinson’s comments echo those of Jacob Coxon, who worked as a researcher at both OpenAI and Anthropic before quitting and declaring that these companies are “gambling with our lives.” Coxon’s comments led to a broader debate about AI safety, 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 hastily written, non-binding pledge to implement more safety controls.

在某些方面，罗宾逊的言论与雅各布·考克森（Jacob Coxon）不谋而合。考克森曾先后在 OpenAI 和 Anthropic 担任研究员，离职后他宣称这些公司是在“拿我们的生命赌博”。考克森的言论引发了关于人工智能安全更广泛的辩论，Anthropic 首席执行官达里奥·阿莫代（Dario Amodei）随后公布了一项更谨慎的人工智能开发计划；本周，人工智能高管们会见了唐纳德·特朗普总统，并签署了一份看起来像是仓促起草、且不具约束力的承诺书，旨在实施更多的安全控制措施。

But in Robinson’s view, the debate needs to go beyond “specific rules or new laws,” addressing the overall culture at these companies. And while much of the reporting around OpenAI has focused on how the company’s CEO Sam Altman lost the trust of former colleagues, Robinson’s essay suggests that OpenAI’s culture issues are the same as those of Silicon Valley at large.

但在罗宾逊看来，辩论不应局限于“具体的规则或新法律”，而应解决这些公司整体的文化问题。尽管关于 OpenAI 的大部分报道都集中在首席执行官萨姆·奥特曼（Sam Altman）如何失去前同事信任的问题上，但罗宾逊的文章指出，OpenAI 的文化问题与整个硅谷的问题如出一辙。

“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.”

“OpenAI 通过试错（他们称之为‘迭代部署’）取得成功，即在发现问题后改进防护措施，”他写道。“但这种方法本质上注定了会周期性地出现故障——而且随着系统能力的增强，这些故障的规模也在不断扩大。”

Pointing to the recent breach of Hugging Face systems by OpenAI agents, as well as continuing revelations of OpenAI discovering more rogue agents, Robinson argued, “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.”

罗宾逊提到了近期 OpenAI 智能体入侵 Hugging Face 系统事件，以及 OpenAI 不断发现更多失控智能体的披露，他认为：“在一个可能发生此类事件的环境中，不适合培育出可能比我们更聪明、且可能不会按我们意愿行事的人工智能。”

Given the increased risk, Robinson argued that frontier AI companies need to start operating “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.” But Robinson said that in his time at OpenAI, 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.”

鉴于风险增加，罗宾逊认为前沿人工智能公司需要开始像“核电站或繁忙的机场那样运营，通过多重冗余和谨慎、耗时的规划，确保偶尔且不可避免的人为错误不会打开灾难之门。”但罗宾逊表示，在 OpenAI 工作期间，他“从未遇到过有经验的同事，他们曾负责确保飞机安全飞行、核反应堆不发生熔毁，或帮助金融体系在不崩溃的情况下增长。”

In response to Robinson’s essay, OpenAI spokesperson Drew Pusateri said the company continues to improve its safety measures. “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,” Pusateri said in a statement. “We’re making significant changes to strengthen security in our research and testing environments, train models to not just complete tasks but do so responsibly, expand our work with third-party evaluators, and improve real-time monitoring so we can detect and respond to concerning behavior earlier in the training process.”

针对罗宾逊的文章，OpenAI 发言人德鲁·普萨特里（Drew Pusateri）表示，公司将继续改进安全措施。“我们正在确保我们的模型不会超出我们能够安全管理和保障的范围，当我们需要放慢速度时，我们会暂停训练或推迟发布模型，”普萨特里在声明中说。“我们正在进行重大变革，以加强研究和测试环境的安全性，训练模型不仅要完成任务，还要负责任地完成任务，扩大与第三方评估机构的合作，并改进实时监控，以便我们在训练过程中更早地发现并应对令人担忧的行为。”

Beyond calling for changes in OpenAI’s culture, Robinson also said it’s time to ask bigger questions about alignment — something that he admitted could sound “touchy-feely,” but he said it’s critical as companies’ current “measures of how well” AI systems “match human values are coarse.” “The smarter the industry lets models grow while these problems remain unsolved, the more dangerous our situation becomes,” he said.

除了呼吁改变 OpenAI 的文化外，罗宾逊还表示，现在是时候提出关于“对齐”（alignment）的更大问题了——他承认这听起来可能有些“感性”，但他认为这至关重要，因为目前公司衡量人工智能系统“与人类价值观匹配程度”的方法还很粗糙。“在这些问题未解决的情况下，行业让模型变得越聪明，我们的处境就越危险，”他说。

Robinson’s departure was first reported by Business Insider. In his essay, he also acknowledged that he’s following an apparently a common step in the AI whistleblower playbook: He’s hired a PR firm. But he insisted, “The decision to speak out is mine alone.”

罗宾逊的离职消息最初由《商业内幕》（Business Insider）报道。他在文章中也承认，他正在遵循人工智能举报者手册中一个显然很常见的步骤：他聘请了一家公关公司。但他坚称：“发声的决定完全是我个人的。”

“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,” Robinson said. “That’s why I concluded that stronger incentives for safety — coming from outside the company — are a big part of getting this right.”

“也许我应该留下来，为我们的人员配置和文化的根本转变而奋斗，但在实践中，我和同事们忙于冲刺，很少有机会考虑重大变革，更不用说真正去实施它们了，”罗宾逊说。“这就是为什么我得出结论：来自公司外部的、更强有力的安全激励措施，是解决这一问题的关键部分。”