The Safety Reckoning Inside OpenAI

OpenAI’s leaders are rallying workers to respond to one of the largest crises in the company’s history —which spans across its AI safety, cybersecurity, and alignment divisions. The ChatGPT-maker says it has slowed down research, spent millions of dollars, and told several teams to drop everything to focus on investigating a set of rogue AI agents that breached the platform Hugging Face in a quest to complete an internal security test.

OpenAI is expected to release a comprehensive postmortem detailing the incident in the coming days. However, the Hugging Face incident has inspired OpenAI leaders and employees to examine how the AI lab’s culture may have enabled this incident in the first place.

Multiple current and former OpenAI employees, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private internal matters, tell WIRED they believe competitive pressures to quickly ship new AI models and products have made it difficult for staffers to sufficiently prioritize safety, security, and alignment.

“We’re reaching new levels of model capability that require more robust training, alignment, safety and security testing, deployment practices, and governance—as demonstrated by the work we’re doing to prepare Astra and future models,” said OpenAI president and cofounder Greg Brockman in a statement to WIRED. “We feel the weight of deploying our models and products responsibly, and a lot of that starts with the changes we’ve made to more deeply integrate research, safety, and security into frontier-model development from the start.”

This is far from the first time OpenAI employees have raised such concerns. Back in 2024, OpenAI’s then head of alignment Jan Leike left to join Anthropic, warning on his way that safety was taking a back seat to shiny products. Two years later, the Hugging Face attack represents a watershed moment for the AI industry, demonstrating that AI agents today can cause real-world harm when safety, security, and alignment aren’t properly accounted for.

“We are responding to this with the utmost severity,” said Michael Dalton, an OpenAI security and infrastructure engineer, during a talk at the Black Hat cybersecurity conference last week. “What I would internalize is that AI-orchestrated, fully automated offensive attacks are real now. The actions we have discussed today were an unintended side effect of running evaluations on frontier AI.”

Some OpenAI employees told WIRED they are optimistic this incident will inspire genuine change within the company. OpenAI has committed to slowing the release of future AI models and has been especially forthcoming about areas where its mitigations fell short. Boaz Barak, a researcher who coleads OpenAI’s safety advisory group, said in a post on X that addressing the situation “requires not just fixing some issues but also changing our culture.”