Opinion | I Worked on Safety at OpenAI. This Is What It Should Do Now.

Steven Adler, the former head of product safety at OpenAI, writes in a guest essay for Times Opinion:

For months, news that artificial intelligence agents from OpenAI had gone rogue and attacked another company’s systems (as well as OpenAI’s own systems) has dripped out and brought harrowing details into focus. The public is struggling to catch up: What are these secret A.I. systems? What are these “swarms” capable of, today and in the near future? Is it possible to stop them from breaking rules and committing cybercrimes?

After having spent four years working on safety at OpenAI, I can tell you those questions are difficult to answer, because not even A.I.’s developers understand what boundaries their models will obey. Nonetheless, the big A.I. companies continue to develop technology they concede might cause human extinction — arguing that if they don’t develop it, somebody else will.

Competitive dynamics like this demand governments take action to slow things down and set clearer safety standards (I hope President Trump and China’s president, Xi Jinping, lay the groundwork for a treaty at their summit this month). But there are simple steps that the biggest A.I. companies could take now to help avoid the most perilous future. We should not be resigned to dangerous models running amok. If these companies don’t meet the moment, trust in them will continue to erode, including from their own employees. The backlash may even lead to prohibitions on developing these technologies altogether.