Current and former OpenAI employees warn of AI's 'serious risk' and lack of oversight

A group of current and former OpenAI employees published an open letter Tuesday describing concerns about the artificial intelligence industry's rapid advancement despite a lack of oversight and an absence of whistleblower protections for those who wish to speak up.

"AI companies have strong financial incentives to avoid effective oversight, and we do not believe bespoke structures of corporate governance are sufficient to change this," the employees wrote in the open letter.

OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Meta and other companies are at the helm of a generative AI arms race — a market that is predicted to top $1 trillion in revenue within a decade — as companies in seemingly every industry rush to add AI-powered chatbots and agents to avoid being left behind by competitors.

The current and former employees wrote AI companies have "substantial non-public information" about what their technology can do, the extent of the safety measures they've put in place and the risk levels that technology has for different types of harm.

"We also understand the serious risks posed by these technologies," they wrote, adding that the companies "currently have only weak obligations to share some of this information with governments, and none with civil society. We do not think they can all be relied upon to share it voluntarily."

The letter also details the current and former employees' concerns about insufficient whistleblower protections for the AI industry, stating that without effective government oversight, employees are in a relatively unique position to hold companies accountable.

"Broad confidentiality agreements block us from voicing our concerns, except to the very companies that may be failing to address these issues," the signatories