Business, Innovation, Science and Trade Committee
13 October 2026
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Business, Innovation, Science and Trade Committee House of Commons
Follow its sittings00:03 - 00:39
Lab Member of Parliament | Birmingham Hodge Hill and Solihull North
Member of Parliament | Birmingham Hodge Hill and Solihull North Order, order, welcome to today's session of the Business, Innovation, Science and Trade Committee inquiry into AI safety and governance. We are incredibly grateful to you our witnesses for joining us here in the House of Commons today and for joining us at what I know is a very early hour on the West Coast. So thank you very much on behalf of the UK Parliament for coming and giving evidence to us. Daniel, I'm going to start with you if I may. Could you just tell us why did you resign from OpenAI?
00:39 - 01:44
Daniel Kokotajlo
Executive Director, AI Futures Project
So OpenAI and Anthropic and some of these other companies are trying to build superintelligence, which means AI systems that are better than the best humans at everything while also being faster and cheaper. If you really internalize that and think about the implications of for the world if they succeed or even if they get anywhere close to succeeding, it's truly, well, there's so many implications, we can get into that later. But for years these companies have been saying, yes, this would be incredibly transformative, yes, it could go really badly, but it could also go really well. That's why we need to be the ones doing it because we are the good guys, we know how to make it, you know, go better than those other bad guys out there who might do it less responsibly than us. Basically, I left OpenAI because I came to believe that OpenAI in fact would not behave responsibly around the creation of this technology and that OpenAI was rationalizing why they needed to be in the lead and why they needed to build this as fast as possible.
01:44 - 01:48
Speaker 2
So basically I lost confidence in the leadership.
01:48 - 01:56
Lab Member of Parliament | Birmingham Hodge Hill and Solihull North
Member of Parliament | Birmingham Hodge Hill and Solihull North I just want to make sure we've captured that correctly, Daniel. So you said OpenAI would not behave responsibly. That was your belief.
01:56 - 01:58
Speaker 1
That's my belief, yes.
01:58 - 02:07
Lab Member of Parliament | Birmingham Hodge Hill and Solihull North
Member of Parliament | Birmingham Hodge Hill and Solihull North Okay. Stephen, you I think have also left OpenAI. Can you tell us why you took that decision?
02:07 - 03:12
Steven Adler
Co-Founder and Chief Scientist, Guidelight AI Standards
Hi, good afternoon. Yeah, I for me the process was essentially a year of losing trust as Daniel said in the company to behave responsibly. Daniel's departure was actually one part of that for me because upon leaving he was asked to sign a pretty restrictive non-disparagement that you also couldn't tell people about and I thought this was kind of unbecoming of the company to be restricting speech in this way that if they meant their mission to try to achieve this technology responsibly, they should not essentially coerce people into not criticizing the company under forfeiture of their compensation. I also saw while working at the company the ways in which there was pressure not to speak candidly as a scientist, you know, pressure not to use words like dangerous, pressure to play up the benefits of artificial intelligence, not just talk about the risks, ways that I felt were distortive of being able to give the public a proper understanding of the technology. I also saw the ways in which the company really moved fast without gravity for the stakes.
03:12 - 03:47
Speaker 7
It felt like even when we didn't have a plan for how we would ultimately make sure we could control this technology, people were excited by breakthroughs.
They were always celebrating the next big step, even though we knew we weren't ready. And so ultimately the straw that broke the camel's back, I was happy to stay so long as I had a team I believed in. When my manager left the company, our team disbanded and it became clear that to stay at OpenAI would mean working on things I didn't believe in, rather than a safety-oriented role. And it's, you know, it's much better on the outside in terms of being able to speak freely about the stakes of the technology and help the public understand.
03:47 - 04:11
Lab Member of Parliament | Birmingham Hodge Hill and Solihull North
Member of Parliament | Birmingham Hodge Hill and Solihull North Steven, you were responsible for helping lead product safety and dangerous capability evaluation teams. And you're telling us that there was pressure on you not to talk about those risks or use language like dangerous, even when you saw there was danger.