The Myth of Safe AI; The Atlantic, October 22, 2026

 Matteo Wong , The Atlantic; The Myth of Safe AI

Silicon Valley promises to make AI benevolent. That may be technically impossible.

"Three months prior to the launch of ChatGPT, OpenAI published what would prove to be a prescient blog outlining the firm’s approach to ensuring that its AI models would be safe and beneficent. This goal, known as “alignment”—as in, aligning AI with human values—is nebulous, grand, and perhaps the AI industry’s most foundational promise. The notion is right there in OpenAI’s mission statement to ensure AI “benefits all of humanity” and listed as one of Anthropic’s “primary” goals.

Yet even in the summer of 2022, OpenAI was admitting a sort of defeat: “There is currently no known indefinitely scalable solution to the alignment problem,” three of its researchers wrote in that same blog post, adding that developing one “is likely very difficult.”

If the goal of keeping AI beneficial to mankind sounds rather vague, it is. Four years later, the alignment problem remains unsolved, and for that matter, there isn’t consensus about what the problem even is. Meanwhile, AI bots are autonomously hacking sovereign nations. And sending fake murder tips to police hotlines. And creating aliases to launch phishing campaigns. OpenAI and Anthropic still can’t really tell you what an aligned AI model looks like. But anybody can tell you it doesn’t look like this.

The most influential AI executives and investors in the world fundamentally disagree about the nature of the technology and, more pragmatically, how to make their products safe."

I Quit OpenAI Because Its Culture Is Broken; The Atlantic, October 3, 2026

 David Robinson, The Atlantic; I Quit OpenAI Because Its Culture Is Broken

"What I’m about to tell you has, I realize, become something of a cliché: I resigned this week from OpenAI. I led the writing of the safety reports we published with each major launch. Now I’m joining a parade of former colleagues—at OpenAI and the industry’s other leaders—who have decided that the current path is unacceptable.

I agree with other recently departed staff that the companies building this technology aren’t being nearly careful enough. But I believe that we need to look deeper than specific rules or new laws. We need to talk about culture.

The future depends on wisdom that Silicon Valley lacks. Wisdom about how to handle dangerous technology and, more fundamentally, wisdom about what it means to care for people. This moment needs a degree of humility that isn’t natural for people who have succeeded through their extreme confidence."