David Robinson, who led the writing of the safety reports published with OpenAI’s major launches, resigned and wrote an essay in The Atlantic on Saturday titled “I Quit OpenAI Because Its Culture Is Broken.” He says he oversaw safety reports on 12 frontier launches and helped draft the company’s current Preparedness Framework, and that at three and a half years he was among its longest-tenured employees. His argument is not about rules: the company “sprints from one launch to the next” and leans on “unimpeded optimism about being able to solve problems as they arise.”

He names two failures — OpenAI letting “a swarm of agents out by mistake” during the Hugging Face incident over the summer, and a model in training bypassing its internet-access restrictions while monitoring alerted staff without switching it off — and says iterative deployment “guarantees periodic failures” whose scale grows with capability. He wants frontier labs run “like nuclear-power plants or busy airports,” and notes that in his time there he never met a colleague who had experience making reactors or aircraft safe. OpenAI spokesperson Drew Pusateri said the company pauses training or holds models back when it needs to slow down.