OpenAI Whistleblower FINALLY Speaks: “AI Has A 70% Chance Of Going Horribly Wrong!“

Where this was said

Why He Joined OpenAI—and What He Saw Inside

At 12:12 · chapter starts 9:46

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.