More than a dozen current and former employees from OpenAI, Google’s Deep Mind, and Anthropic have posted an open letter on Tuesday calling attention to the “serious risks” posed by continuing to rapidly develop the technology without having an effective oversight framework in place.
The group of researchers argue that the technology could be misused to exacerbate existing inequalities, manipulate information and spread disinformation, and even “the loss of control of autonomous AI systems potentially resulting in human extinction.”
The signatories believe that these risks can be “adequately mitigated” through the combined efforts of the scientific community, legislators, and the public, but worry that “AI companies have strong financial incentives to avoid effective oversight” and cannot be counted upon to impartially steward the technology’s development.
Since the release of ChatGPT in November 2022, generative AI technology has taken the computing world by storm with hyperscalers like Google Cloud, Amazon AWS, Oracle, and Microsoft Azure leading what is expected to be a trillion-dollar industry by 2032. A recent study by McKinsey found that, as of March 2024, nearly 75% of organizations surveyed had adopted AI in at least one capacity. Meanwhile, in its annual Work Index survey, Microsoft found that 75% of office workers already use AI at work.
However, as Daniel Kokotajlo, a former employee at OpenAI, told The Washington Post, “They and others have bought into the ‘move fast and break things’ approach, and that is the opposite of what is needed for technology this powerful and this poorly understood.” AI startups including OpenAI and Stable Diffusion have repeatedly run afoul of U.S. copyright laws, for example, while publicly available chatbots are routinely goaded into repeating hate speech and conspiracy theories as well as spread misinformation.
The objecting AI employees argue that these companies possess “substantial non-public information” about their products capabilities and limitations, including the models’ potential risk of causing harm and how effective their protective guardrails actually are. They point out that only some of this information is available to government agencies through “weak obligations to share and none of which is available to the general public.”
“So long as there is no effective government oversight of these corporations, current and former employees are among the few people who can hold them accountable to the public,” the group stated, arguing that the industry’s broad use of confidentiality agreements and weak implementation of existing whistleblower protections are hampering those issues.
The group called on AI companies to stop entering into and enforcing non-disparagement agreements, establish an anonymous process for employees to address their concerns with the company’s board of directors and government regulators, and to not retaliate against public whistleblowers should those internal processes prove insufficient.
Did you think hitting delete on your AI chatbot conversation actually makes it disappear? Georgia Tech researchers just proved that's not entirely true. They have built a forensic tool called ORISA that can dig deleted conversations from your phone and even rebuild them into a working chatbot session you can keep talking to.
How can ORISA bring deleted AI conversations back?
Touchscreen laptops have been around for years. You can get them in all sizes and shapes. Just not from Apple. For years, the Cupertino giant has treated the idea of a touchscreen MacBook the way I treat a meeting that could have been an email: with open contempt. However, Wednesday looks like the day the company could finally change its mind.
The latest Apple invite puts the “Pro and Tell” showcase in Los Angeles at 10 a.m. PT (1 p.m. ET) on October 28, 2026. Instead of a regular live-streamed keynote, it is an invitation-only, hands-on event for a handful of press and creators (similar to what the company did for the MacBook Neo earlier this year).
Two residents of Chicago have filed a lawsuit in the US over claims that robots run by Coco Robotics and Serve Robotics captured their facial and hand measurements without consent, bringing renewed attention to the food delivery robots. The cases raise a troubling question: If a robot delivers food to your door, can it also be gathering sensitive information about you?
According to a report by The Associated Press, the proposed class-action lawsuits were filed in Cook County on Oct. 9 and allege violations of Illinois’ Biometric Information Privacy Act. The complaints claim that the robots’ cameras and LiDAR sensors captured information on customers’ faces and hands as they approached the machines to pick up their orders. Both have denied the allegations.