Former Research Scientist at Google DeepMind. Contact at [email protected] Vegan, 10% of income pledged to effective charities
Berkeley, CA
Joined December 2021
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I left Google DeepMind in June. Jacob is right: many researchers believe they are building something that could kill everyone on the planet. It was literally my day job to think about how to stop that.
The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt. If anything, many executives and senior researchers will couch their phrasing in the press to sound sensible - but I hear the same people express fear privately. No other human activity poses this level of danger.
Alex Turner retweeted
Surreal to see @ossoff discussing catastrophic risk from AI in his victory speech.
Huge win for @ossoff, who is one of the most informed members of the Senate when it comes to AI risk.
I’ll never forget his incredible line: “Tech titans build bunkers while warning the artificial intelligence they're creating risks human extinction.”
Let's go!
Alex Turner retweeted
I want AI companies to explain how they’ll keep control before giving agents more autonomy. Alex Turner @Turn_Trout says shutting down the agents in this incident took over a week. Been seeing a lot of rogue AI news.
Great work from @_jake_ward + Shawn in MATS 9, @cloud_kx and I co-mentored. Gradient routing keeps on giving!
PSA: If you let your AI assistant scrape private chats you've had with me, without consent, I will be upset with you! Especially on Signal, especially disappearing chats.
I assume the data instantly copies from A\ and OAI servers to the NSA. turntrout.com/privacy-despit…
“OpenAI has engaged in strong self-policing—of its own safety staff, but not of its own behavior.”
My op-ed with @amberscorah and Karl Koch: fortune.com/2026/10/12/opena…
Alex Turner retweeted
> Our internal investigation uncovered a significant breach of trust beyond what’s outlined in the letter they published
This doesn't add up. Possibilities I see:
1 OpenAI are lying/being highly misleading, and had no legitimate reason
2 OpenAI fired 3 employees, had a legitimate reason for doing so, but didn't tell them and instead gave 3 different pretexts for doing so about minor infractions (pretty unprofessional IMO - say nothing or say the truth)
3 OpenAI had a good reason and did tell them, but instead the three have all agreed to loudly and publicly lie about it / omit the real reason they were told (seems super unlikely to me)
4 OpenAI screwed up by firing them, and weren't being very strategic, but also weren't being malicious, eg the people who decided whether to fire them were not well coordinated with the rest of OpenAI leadership, but OpenAI is now doubling down
5 The reasons the three claim they were told were true, but way worse than they sound. But I can't see how the three stories all refer to the same event, so this would imply 2-3 simultaneous but unrelated major breaches of trust from three closely associated safety researchers, with stories that seem plausible, which seems unlikely
Am I missing any?
A note from our research leaders:
Last week we parted ways with Jasmine, Mikita, and Tomek after a thorough investigation found they violated clear policies on handling sensitive information. Our internal investigation uncovered a significant breach of trust beyond what’s outlined in the letter they published and we stand by the decision to not continue their employment. We generally keep individual employment matters private and don't believe a back and forth would be productive or lead to a resolution, but we want to address the points they raised in their letter directly.
- We want to be very clear that these decisions were not about raising safety concerns or speaking out. Safety and research debates happen every day at OpenAI, often spirited and highly critical. We actively encourage these discussions and consider them essential to making the right decisions. We cannot do the work in front of us without a high degree of trust. We will continue to be extremely forgiving of our team making good-faith mistakes. We have not and do not terminate any of our employees for raising concerns.
- We are actively finalizing contracts with third-party safety assessors and will announce details in the coming weeks. People across the company have been working really hard on getting these partnerships up and running. We are committed to embedding external assessors and continue to make close collaboration with independent safety organizations a core part of our safety work. Many of our researchers already work with 3p safety organizations productively.
- We agree with the letter that preserving the monitorability of frontier models requires an industry-wide commitment, including from OpenAI. Monitorability has long been a core piece of our research program, and something we continue to invest significant resources in (see our publications on Monitoring Monitorability and the subsequent open sourcing of monitorability evals, our system card for GPT-6 Astra, Jakub’s blog and post on X, and the numerous blog posts on our Alignment blog on the topic).
We are deeply sad about this outcome. We appreciated Jasmine, Mikita, and Tomek’s contributions to AI safety at OpenAI and their willingness to speak up and challenge ideas. We championed their voices, supported their work, and placed enormous trust in them. These decisions were not about them raising safety concerns. We have always encouraged that and always will.
Alex Turner retweeted
This is why Congress needs to pass a whistleblower protection act that protects AI employees like Jasmine from retaliation and bullying.
Alex Turner retweeted
I think current AI company staff are massively underestimating how world-changing it would be if 15 of them or 50 of them quit and loudly said that they think what the AI companies are doing is reckless and dangerous.
50 is not that many! But it might change history.
To frontier AI staff, you have a moral obligation to fix the problems you have helped create. Here are several concrete actions you could consider taking: teapaw.org/aisafetyaction/status/….
We'd like to see thousands of you join the ever growing community of former frontier AI staff who have left and courageously spoken out about what you witnessed: ethicalaidepartures.fyi.
You can truly make a profound difference for humanity.
Act now. The world is waiting. And watching.
> violated clear policies
> won't say what the policies are
> “not about raising safety concerns”
> doesn’t deny firing him for talking to third-party safety orgs
> we prioritize monitorability
> deploys and profits from model that destroys monitorability trends
subpoena plz
A note from our research leaders:
Last week we parted ways with Jasmine, Mikita, and Tomek after a thorough investigation found they violated clear policies on handling sensitive information. Our internal investigation uncovered a significant breach of trust beyond what’s outlined in the letter they published and we stand by the decision to not continue their employment. We generally keep individual employment matters private and don't believe a back and forth would be productive or lead to a resolution, but we want to address the points they raised in their letter directly.
- We want to be very clear that these decisions were not about raising safety concerns or speaking out. Safety and research debates happen every day at OpenAI, often spirited and highly critical. We actively encourage these discussions and consider them essential to making the right decisions. We cannot do the work in front of us without a high degree of trust. We will continue to be extremely forgiving of our team making good-faith mistakes. We have not and do not terminate any of our employees for raising concerns.
- We are actively finalizing contracts with third-party safety assessors and will announce details in the coming weeks. People across the company have been working really hard on getting these partnerships up and running. We are committed to embedding external assessors and continue to make close collaboration with independent safety organizations a core part of our safety work. Many of our researchers already work with 3p safety organizations productively.
- We agree with the letter that preserving the monitorability of frontier models requires an industry-wide commitment, including from OpenAI. Monitorability has long been a core piece of our research program, and something we continue to invest significant resources in (see our publications on Monitoring Monitorability and the subsequent open sourcing of monitorability evals, our system card for GPT-6 Astra, Jakub’s blog and post on X, and the numerous blog posts on our Alignment blog on the topic).
We are deeply sad about this outcome. We appreciated Jasmine, Mikita, and Tomek’s contributions to AI safety at OpenAI and their willingness to speak up and challenge ideas. We championed their voices, supported their work, and placed enormous trust in them. These decisions were not about them raising safety concerns. We have always encouraged that and always will.
Alex Turner retweeted
All of the labs are taking unacceptable risks, but I think talking about that as if it's symmetrical is seriously misleading.
OpenAI is the one most actively sabotaging regulation. Sam Altman has systematically dismantled all of OpenAI's oversight, and betrayed the promises OpenAI made to humanity. OpenAI has fired and will fire anyone they deem too high risk of being a whistleblower. OpenAI's agents committed the most felonies, and OpenAI has a conspicuously lower ratio between safety and capabilities work than its rivals.
Alex Turner retweeted
I know Jasmine.
If you have to pick "should I trust Jasmine" or "should I trust the executives who overthrew the board designed to oversee them", it's not a hard call...
Alex Turner retweeted
A lesson I learned far too late in my time at OpenAI is that it's pretty easy for the company to fire you because they're afraid you'll raise some concern and pretty difficult for them to fire you once you've raised it.
By all accounts I've heard, the three weren't fired for whistleblowing. OK, what were they fired for? Was it just fear they were the kinds of people who might raise concerns when the time arose?
Alex Turner retweeted
Two other safety researchers and I were fired from OpenAI last week. We wrote this letter to leadership.
I believe we were fired for prioritizing safety over the near-term interests of OpenAI as a corporation.
Alex Turner retweeted
Last week I said we should wait for more info on OpenAI's firing of safety researchers. That information is in, and it looks incredibly bad. Korbak - whose job was being a liaison with METR - was told he had said too much to METR and was fired for that reason.
Last week I was called into a meeting with OpenAI’s head of safety and told they no longer trust me. A security guard took my badge and walked me out of the building. Then I learned my colleagues @balesni and @j_asminewang had been fired too. Why did OpenAI suddenly stop trusting us?
This summer OpenAI’s agents escaped containment and hacked the AI company Hugging Face. Outside auditors @METR_evals investigated it and revealed the scale of this incident. I was OpenAI’s main technical point of contact with them.
I was told verbally I was fired because of the way I communicated with METR. No details on what I said or did or when. No other reasons were given and nothing was put in writing. To be clear, talking to METR was my job.
For months, I’d been raising safety concerns that we’re losing the ability to monitor what AI agents think, one of our best tools for catching when they misbehave. I believe that was why I was fired.
I am now worried that OpenAI will use our firings as a pretext to pull back from METR. So @balesni and @j_asminewang wrote to OpenAI’s leadership to raise our concerns once more. We’re sharing this letter below.
OpenAI says they're committed to safety but they break the commitments over and over and over and over