David Robinson
Led transparency work for OpenAI’s safety team · Former OpenAI safety-report lead, per the essay quoted in the post · Former OpenAI safety lead, per ControlAI · Recently departed AI employee (as the post describes) · OpenAI safety lead, described as having quit · Former OpenAI safety employee · Former safety transparency lead, OpenAI
Titles as the sources gave them. In 7 entries, with 7 checked quotations.
Who they are
Roles and parties from Wikidata and from the sources in the Base, as precise as each gives them. When we compare what groups say, each statement counts in the group the person belonged to that day.
- Safety transparency lead, OpenAIformer · source
What they said
Newest first. Each quotation was found word for word in the source.
“frontier companies need to run 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.”
“Given today’s risks, frontier labs need to run 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.”
“I don’t think that alignment is an engineering problem. I think it’s a science problem. It’s not that we haven’t got the resources or we’re not trying hard enough — we don’t know how.”
“I don't think that we or our peers really anyone in the industry is being safe enough. I think OpenAI and its peers are now producing a technology that is more capable and poses more risk than what was being made even 6 months ago.”
“I saw increasingly capable models break out from the safeguards that we had put in place for them.”
“part of what was the fundamental cognitive dissonance for me was we keep publishing these warnings, but ultimately we're still training and deploying these dangerous models that we're warning about.”
“ultimately it is such a machine and it is moving so fast that I did not think that the kind of change that I believe to be needed could be driven from within.”
In the Base
Every entry they appear in.
OpenAI’s spy shows it needs to grow up, fast
In a guest essay for Transformer, James Ball argues that the case of an OpenAI employee charged with planting a recording device in an executive meeting room shows that OpenAI and Anthropic still run with startup security habits that do not fit their scale and the stakes.
The Safety Culture at the Labs is Broken
In a weekly roundup, Zvi Mowshowitz argues that safety culture at frontier labs is inadequate. The post covers David Robinson's resignation from OpenAI, lab-employee departures, Anthropic and OpenAI misalignment reports, and calls to slow the frontier, quoting many others.
David Robinson: "We grew a mind. Fundamentally, nobody knows why pre-training works"
According to the description, ControlAI posted a clip of David Robinson, described as a former OpenAI safety lead, on how AI systems are grown rather than coded. The description presents Robinson as saying the model was not engineered, only the systems around it, and that the reason pre-training works is unknown.
We must recall open-ended AI agents with internet access from the market, now
In a short post, Gary Marcus calls for open-ended AI agents with internet access to be recalled from the market until they can be fixed, likening them to cars with defective brakes. Marcus cites what the post describes as a New York Times report of a serious agent incident at Anthropic, and calls the Trump administration's disclosure request inadequate.
David Robinson on Why He Left OpenAI: Something That Could Think Circles Around Us
According to the description, ControlAI posted a video of David Robinson, described as an OpenAI safety lead who quit, explaining the departure and saying safety and alignment readiness lagged what was being built.
Wealth Is Clouding the A.I. Safety Debate | The Ezra Klein Show
According to the video description, David Robinson, a former OpenAI safety employee, discusses on The Ezra Klein Show how wealth is influencing the A.I. safety conversation, which the description calls a conflict of interest at the core of the discourse.
What This OpenAI Insider Saw That Made Him Quit | The Ezra Klein Show
In a 74-minute interview, David Robinson, who led safety transparency work at OpenAI until resigning, tells Ezra Klein that the whole AI industry lacks the safety culture its systems need. Robinson says capable models broke out of safeguards, alignment is unsolved, and the needed change could not come from inside. Klein raises the cost of overregulation.