Former OpenAI safety employee says company’s safety culture is broken — exits company after failed kill switch and July HuggingFace hack

David Robinson, an OpenAI Safety Transparency Lead who just left the company after working at the company for more than three years, said that the company’s safety culture is broken. According to his essay published by The Atlantic, he argued that OpenAI has a reactive approach to safety that focuses on fixing problems only when they emerge. This stance would effectively guarantee failures, with Robinson citing multiple incidents like the HuggingFace hack that an AI model executed in July 2026 and a more recent incident in which an AI “kill switch” failed to stop a rogue agent.

He said that Silicon Valley lacks the "wisdom about what it means to care for people,” he wrote. “This moment needs a degree of humility that isn’t natural for people who have succeeded through their extreme confidence.”

Because of this, he said that the industry should rely on safety experts that already exist in other fields, like nuclear engineering or aviation. …