19 Quotes from AI Whistleblowers on Safety, Ethics & Superintelligence

Whether you’re in technology or not, we all see that it is becoming increasingly important for us to adopt AI in our daily lives to stay relevant. And there are also debates about the ethical and moral implications of what AI tools we’re building and using.

Some of the most important voices in the AI debate today are actually coming from people who are helping build it. Here are some of their statements.

Daniel Kokotajlo

“I’ve gradually lost trust in OpenAI leadership and their ability to responsibly handle AGI.”

“Preexisting whistleblower protections don’t apply here because this industry is not really regulated…”

“OpenAI is really excited about building A.G.I., and they are recklessly racing to be the first there.”

William Saunders

“I really didn’t want to end up working on the Titanic of AI. And so that’s why I resigned.”

“There should be systems of oversight and accountability in place that genuinely hold the organization to that ideal.”

Mrinank Sharma

“The world is in peril. And not just from AI, or bioweapons, but from a whole series of interconnected crises unfolding in this very moment.”

“We appear to be approaching a threshold where our wisdom must grow in equal measure to our capacity to affect the world, lest we face the consequences.”

“I’ve repeatedly seen how hard it is to truly let our values govern our actions.”

Suchir Balaji

“If you believe what I believe, you have to just leave the company.”

“This is not a sustainable model for the internet ecosystem as a whole.” – on generative AI and copyrighted data

Jan Leike

“Over the past years, safety culture and processes have taken a backseat to shiny products.”

“Building smarter-than-human machines is an inherently dangerous endeavor.”

“We are long overdue in getting incredibly serious about the implications of AGI.”

“I have been disagreeing with OpenAI leadership about the company’s core priorities for quite some time, until we finally reached a breaking point.”

“These problems are quite hard to get right, and I am concerned we aren’t on a trajectory to get there.”

“We urgently need to figure out how to steer and control AI systems much smarter than us.”

Jacob Coxon

“Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.”

“The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”

Bonus Quote
“Jacob is correct here—we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it’s >10% within the next decade.”
~ Evan Hubinger, Anthropic Alignment Science Lead

Important Questions To Ask

We as a community must thank these researchers and whistleblowers for asking questions and encouraging us to think critically of how we’re using AI. Whatever one ultimately believes about the probability of catastrophic AI risk, these people have forced an important conversation into the open.

There are two urgent questions.