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OpenAI has formed<\/a> a new committee to oversee \u201ccritical\u201d safety and security decisions related to the company\u2019s projects and operations. But, in a move that\u2019s sure to raise the ire of ethicists, OpenAI\u2019s chosen to staff the committee with company insiders \u2014 including Sam Altman, OpenAI\u2019s CEO \u2014 rather than outside observers.<\/p>\n Altman and the rest of the Safety and Security Committee \u2014 OpenAI board members Bret Taylor, Adam D\u2019Angelo and Nicole Seligman as well as chief scientist Jakub Pachocki, Aleksander Madry (who leads OpenAI\u2019s \u201cpreparedness\u201d team), Lilian Weng (head of safety systems), Matt Knight (head of security) and John Schulman (head of \u201calignment science\u201d) \u2014 will be responsible for evaluating OpenAI\u2019s safety processes and safeguards over the next 90 days, according to a post on the company\u2019s corporate blog. The committee will then share its findings and recommendations with the full OpenAI board of directors for review, OpenAI says, at which point it\u2019ll publish an update on any adopted suggestions \u201cin a manner that is consistent with safety and security.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cOpenAI has recently begun training its next frontier model and we anticipate the resulting systems to bring us to the next level of capabilities on our path to [artificial general intelligence,],\u201d OpenAI writes. \u201cWhile we are proud to build and release models that are industry-leading on both capabilities and safety, we welcome a robust debate at this important moment.\u201d<\/p>\n OpenAI has over the past few months seen several<\/a> high-profile departures from the safety side of its technical team \u2014 and some of these ex-staffers have voiced concerns about what they see as an intentional de-prioritization of AI safety. <\/p>\n Daniel Kokotajlo, who worked on OpenAI\u2019s governance team, quit<\/a> in April after losing confidence that OpenAI would \u201cbehave responsibly\u201d around the release of increasingly capable AI, as he wrote on a post in his personal blog. And Ilya Sutskever, an OpenAI co-founder and formerly the company\u2019s chief scientist, left in May<\/a> after a protracted battle with Altman and Altman\u2019s allies \u2014 reportedly in part over Altman\u2019s rush to launch AI-powered products at the expense of safety work.<\/p>\n More recently, Jan Leike, a former DeepMind researcher who while at OpenAI was involved with the development of ChatGPT and ChatGPT\u2019s predecessor, InstructGPT, resigned from his safety research role, saying<\/a> in a series of posts on X that he believed OpenAI \u201cwasn\u2019t on the trajectory\u201d to get issues pertaining to AI security and safety \u201cright.\u201d AI policy researcher Gretchen Krueger, who left OpenAI last week, echoed Leike\u2019s statements, calling on the company<\/a> to improve its accountability and transparency and \u201cthe care with which [it uses its] own technology.\u201d<\/p>\n