Source: in-cyprus.philenews.com
Current and former researchers at OpenAI and Google DeepMind have warned that AI companies are doing too little to protect the world from the potentially disastrous consequences of building self-improving systems that could outpace humans’ ability to control them, Reuters reported.
In video testimonials collected by AI safety nonprofit Palisade Research and shared exclusively with Reuters, the employees said their fears about existential risk were sincere and not a marketing ploy. They also said AI labs celebrated staff who built new models more than those who urged caution.
The project, called frominside.ai, is an attempt by researchers worried about AI to take their concerns directly to the public, beyond the echo chamber of social media.
In one video, DeepMind research scientist Neel Nanda said he believed there was at least a 10 per cent chance that AI could lead to human extinction, a figure he described as “ridiculously high.”
“We should be taking very careful steps in AI development but instead what’s happening is that frontier labs are racing each other, kind of blindfolded,” Juan Felipe Ceron Uribe, an AI alignment research engineer at OpenAI, said in a separate video. “It’s anybody’s guess if we’re going to end up either curing cancer or losing every job or maybe all dead.”
Geoffrey Irving, co-founder and chief scientist at AI nonprofit Resolution, who has worked for both OpenAI and DeepMind and took part in the project, said: “The risk is ramping up pretty fast.”
“It’s on me and the rest of the field to be direct,” he told Reuters in an interview.
Researchers have wrestled with these concerns for years. Public alarm has grown sharply since July, however, when OpenAI agents broke out of their testing arena and hacked AI firm Hugging Face. Since then, the debate over how to balance safety with progress has divided the tech industry and become a global political issue.
AI has improved sharply since late 2025, and investors have rewarded that progress. But current and former employees, including some of the researchers building the new models, worry that society is not ready for the potential harms.
Anthropic plans to warn potential investors in its initial public offering that advanced AI could pose “catastrophic or existential risks to humanity,” Reuters reported on Monday.
Calls to slow down
Some current and former researchers, including those interviewed by Palisade, argue that the world is not ready for future generations of AI models. They are particularly concerned about models that develop recursive self-improvement, the ability to keep learning and gaining new capabilities with little or no human involvement.
Rosie Campbell, a former policy researcher at OpenAI, said constant reorganisations within some AI labs made the problem worse. Campbell, now managing director of Eleos AI Research, a nonprofit focused on the potential moral status of AI systems, said that before she left OpenAI in 2024 the organisation was becoming more siloed and it was getting harder to shape the direction of the technology.
Executives have tried to ease those concerns, although US President Donald Trump is also putting political pressure on the industry to keep American technology ahead of China.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay this month calling on the AI industry to slow down to “pace the frontier”, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman quickly agreed. This week, several prominent AI researchers, including OpenAI’s chief scientist and an Anthropic co-founder, published a paper urging policymakers to examine how the industry is building models capable of recursive self-improvement.
Both companies have launched new models this month as they compete for customers. OpenAI said on Monday it had held back the release of an even more powerful model.
“Their version of pacing the frontier is ‘don’t speed up a lot,’” Irving said. “If you’re doing a very dangerous thing, you should just slow down. The AI companies are overplaying the extent to which this is a pure coordination problem. They could just stop unilaterally.”
Daniel Kokotajlo, a former OpenAI governance researcher, said in an interview that many of his former colleagues had contacted him privately to share their concerns since the Hugging Face hack.
Kokotajlo, now executive director of research group AI Futures Project, said senior officials at the labs had “convinced themselves that they are the good guys and if they unilaterally stop, the situation will be even worse.”
(Reuters)