Podbit · The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Kokotajlo didn't leave just over the NDA. He left because OpenAI's founding safety narrative had quietly become a rationalisation. When he joined in 2022, the shared assumption was that they'd pause before achieving recursive self-improvement to make it safe. By the time he left, that assumption was gone — replaced by political pressure to say AI wasn't risky after all.
Where this was said
At 14:24 · chapter starts 13:04
Steven Bartlett asks Kokotajlo to tell his story. He describes running the AI Futures Project, a small nonprofit focused on AI forecasting — analogous to the work industry analysts do for hedge funds, but applied specifically to AI's trajectory. At OpenAI from 2022, he worked on three things: internal scenario forecasting (smaller predecessors to AI 2027), evaluations for dangerous AI capabilities including cyber abilities and persuasion, and briefly on reinforcement learning for agents. He confirms that AI is genuinely and rapidly improving, driven by scaling laws — bigger models trained on more data become more competent. But inside OpenAI, he became progressively disillusioned. The founding narratives of OpenAI, Anthropic, and DeepMind — 'we know these risks are real, and we're the responsible ones' — he came to see as rationalisations for behaviour driven by competitive and power-seeking incentives. When push comes to shove, he concluded, these companies follow their incentives.
After resigning from OpenAI, Kokotajlo received exit paperwork containing a clause requiring him to never criticise the company — with a secret confidentiality provision attached. He and his wife refused to sign, standing to lose $2 million (80% of their net worth). The decision blew up on the internet, sparked an employee revolt on Slack, and forced OpenAI to reverse the policy.
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