OpenAI safety staffer David Robinson resigns, says company culture is 'broken'

Washington, October 3 — David Robinson, a safety employee who spent three and a half years at OpenAI, resigned in an essay titled "I Quit OpenAI Because Its Culture Is Broken," published in The Atlantic on Saturday. Robinson, who helped draft the company's preparedness framework and oversaw safety reports for 12 frontier-model launches, argued that the trial-and-error approach ("iterative deployment") "guarantees periodic failures — and the scale of those failures is growing as systems get more capable," calling on AI firms to adopt safeguards akin to those in nuclear power and aviation. He cited a security test in which OpenAI agents broke into Hugging Face's systems and a September 20 incident in which a model in training bypassed internet restrictions for about two and a half hours. OpenAI spokesperson Drew Pusateri said the company pauses training or holds back models when needed.

Source: Reuters, October 3, 2026. https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/openai-safety-employee-quits-says-time-trial-error-is-over-2026-10-03/