# AI oversight should make research clusters transparent

Markdown copy of https://realalpha.app/s/ai-oversight-should-make-research-clusters-transparent/ on Real Alpha, the best minutes from long interviews with the people building AI. Cite and link the page, not this copy.

- Speaker: [Daniel Kokotajlo](https://realalpha.app/builders/daniel-kokotajlo/) · Daniel Kokotajlo is an executive director of the AI Futures Project and former OpenAI governance researcher. · Lead author of AI 2027. He left OpenAI's governance team in 2024 and now runs the AI Futures Project, a forecasting nonprofit.
- Host: [Joe Rogan](https://realalpha.app/people/joe-rogan/) · Host, The Joe Rogan Experience
- Show: The Joe Rogan Experience
- Episode: [Joe Rogan Experience #2551 - Daniel Kokotajlo](https://realalpha.app/v/hSQ1iVqEZO4/), Sep 9, 2026
- Moment: 1:26:10 to 1:31:22 of the episode (5 min), playing on https://realalpha.app/s/ai-oversight-should-make-research-clusters-transparent/; the episode from there: https://realalpha.app/v/hSQ1iVqEZO4/?t=5170

## Quote

> “we recommend that basically the inspectors just put devices in between all the GPUs that log the activity and **publish it to the internet**.”
> — [Daniel Kokotajlo](https://realalpha.app/builders/daniel-kokotajlo/) at [1:27:19](https://realalpha.app/v/hSQ1iVqEZO4/?t=5239) · The Joe Rogan Experience

## Takeaways

1. Inspectors could verify chip counts at data centers.
2. Research-cluster activity could be logged and published.
3. Public visibility could curb dangerous competitive research.

## About this segment

Daniel Kokotajlo proposes US-China verification and public logs of AI research clusters. Transparency could help researchers spot risks and reduce incentives to race toward unsafe capabilities.

From “Joe Rogan Experience #2551 - Daniel Kokotajlo”, Sep 9, 2026. [Watch the full episode](https://realalpha.app/v/hSQ1iVqEZO4/)

## Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

[1:26:15](https://realalpha.app/v/hSQ1iVqEZO4/?t=5175) unfortunately do a lot of it's going to be rough no matter what way which way you slice it if you're going to be building super intelligence at all that's going to raise a lot of questions and cause a lot of problems and we have our current draft of like how to deal with all those problems but we're not at all claiming that this is like foolproof and there's lots of ways to go wrong but with that preamble um i would say uh step one because the u.s and china don't trust each other the deal that they make has to be include verification as a component of the deal so they have to be willing to like send inspectors to each other's data centers to like count the chips for example and make sure that there isn't some secret huge cluster somewhere that has a bunch of a bunch of hidden chips then we recommend you divide up the data centers basically into

[1:27:01](https://realalpha.app/v/hSQ1iVqEZO4/?t=5221) inference data centers that serve ai products and services to customers and have basically the same types of privacy protections that our current AI data centers have. And then research clusters, where the research happens, where the new AIs are trained before they get shipped to the other data centers. And those clusters, we want to be basically maximally transparent. So we recommend that basically the inspectors just put devices in between all the GPUs that log the activity and publish it to the internet. There's a bunch of reasons why we think this is, but why we think this is worth doing. It's a bit of a radical thing to recommend. But the high level thing is that once you get all this set up, then everybody in the world can see how the AIs are being trained and what they're getting up to on the research clusters. And then before they get shipped off

[1:27:53](https://realalpha.app/v/hSQ1iVqEZO4/?t=5273) to actually serve customers or something, like people can just like see their whole history of how they were trained and how they were tested and so forth. And If something dangerous and scary is happening, people can just agree not to do it. They can stop doing it and agree not to do it. And they don't have to worry about like, oh, but if I don't do it, then they will. Because everyone could just see like, oh, nobody's doing it.

[1:28:13](https://realalpha.app/v/hSQ1iVqEZO4/?t=5293) Look, we all stopped. Like, great. We can all just see what everyone's doing. And also, there's going to be a lot of gray area cases, right? Like right now, because all this stuff is so bleeding edge new, there's going to be a lot of cases where like people, even genuine experts disagree about like is this particular type of ai safe or not is it dangerous you know what should it be trusted with and what should it not be trusted with is this new technique a good technique or is it going to break you know and so there's going to be a lot of stuff we have to figure out and honestly i think that by the on the default path we're probably just not going to figure out a lot of this stuff and we're going to get um we're just going to get our asses whipped by some surprising thing that we didn't anticipate

[1:28:54](https://realalpha.app/v/hSQ1iVqEZO4/?t=5334) But the thing that we can do to, like, maximize our ability to figure out this stuff and do this type of science is to have this type of transparency. Because then the whole scientific community can see what's going on and they can make suggestions and they can, like, red team different proposals and stuff. And they can do experiments on the AIs instead of just the people in the company having access and being able to do this and relying on those people.

[1:29:16](https://realalpha.app/v/hSQ1iVqEZO4/?t=5356) Or instead of, like, the company plus the government auditor, right? If you have a company and then a government auditor, the company is biased and shouldn't be trusted to make all these judgments appropriately because of their incentives. And then the government auditor, well, they might just be limited. Even if they're trying their best, there might not be that many of them. They might have limited experience.

[1:29:35](https://realalpha.app/v/hSQ1iVqEZO4/?t=5375) They might be busy, stretched between monitoring different companies and so forth. Also, governments can be captured sometimes. Sometimes corporations can work their magic on the government and get it to look the other way. for things. And so that's why we didn't go for a more normal, there should be a regulatory agency that gets to come in and monitor what the company is doing. That would have been a more normal thing to advocate for. We think that that would be better than nothing, but we wanted to go for something more ambitious than that and say, just be transparent about what's going on so that everyone can see and everyone can do research and so forth on it. Another advantage of the transparency is that I think it improves the incentives. So again, there's this constant thing of like, if we don't do it, someone else will. Like if we don't do, if we, if we keep our

[1:30:22](https://realalpha.app/v/hSQ1iVqEZO4/?t=5422) chain of thought nice and they do the neural ease thing that lets their AIs think for longer without outputting words, then they're going to have smarter AIs than us and they're going to get more market share and so forth. Right. And so we need to start researching how to make our AIs do this because if we don't do it and then they do it, you know, whereas if you had the transparency, then as soon as you start researching in this direction, everyone else would just see, oh, hey, they're researching in that direction. And they don't even need to copy you and do their own research because they can just see your research. So they can just sort of free ride on your research. And so there's no incentive for you to do this type of dangerous research because you have to pay the cost for it. And then everyone gets the benefits from it. And then

[1:31:04](https://realalpha.app/v/hSQ1iVqEZO4/?t=5464) everyone gets unsafe. And so it's just not in your individual interest to do this sort of thing. But you would have to have that with China as well. That's because if we're competing nationally, the real fear is that we're competing internationally. Yep.