Ex-OpenAI staff call for "right to warn" about AI risks without retaliation
Ex-OpenAI staff call for “right to warn” about AI risks without retaliation

                      
                      
          On Tuesday, a group of former OpenAI and Google DeepMind employees published an open letter calling for AI companies to commit to principles allowing employees to raise concerns about AI risks without fear of retaliation. The letter, titled "A Right to Warn about Advanced Artificial Intelligence," has so far been signed by 13 individuals, including some who chose to remain anonymous due to concerns about potential repercussions.

The signatories argue that while AI has the potential to deliver benefits to humanity, it also poses serious risks that include "further entrenchment of existing inequalities, to manipulation and misinformation, to the loss of control of autonomous AI systems potentially resulting in human extinction."
They also assert that AI companies possess substantial non-public information about their systems' capabilities, limitations, and risk levels, but currently have only weak obligations to share this information with governments and none with civil society.
Non-anonymous signatories to the letter include former OpenAI employees Jacob Hilton, Daniel Kokotajlo, William Saunders, Carroll Wainwright, and Daniel Ziegler, as well as former Google DeepMind employees Ramana Kumar and Neel Nanda.
The group calls upon AI companies to commit to four key principles: not enforcing agreements that prohibit criticism of the company for risk-related concerns, facilitating an anonymous process for employees to raise concerns, supporting a culture of open criticism, and not retaliating against employees who publicly share risk-related confidential information after other processes have failed.
In May, a Vox article by Kelsey Piper raised concerns about OpenAI's use of restrictive non-disclosure agreements for departing employees, which threatened to revoke vested equity if former employees criticized the company. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman responded to the allegations, stating that the company had never clawed back vested equity and would not do so if employees declined to sign the separation agreement or non-disparagement clause.
But critics remained unsatisfied, and OpenAI soon did a public about-face on the issue, saying it would remove the non-disparagement clause and equity clawback provisions from its separation agreements, acknowledging that such terms were inappropriate and contrary to the company's stated values of transparency and accountability. That move from OpenAI is likely what made the current open letter possible.

          
                      
                  