# Harris says OpenAI's safety-minded staff gradually left

Markdown copy of https://realalpha.app/s/harris-says-openais-safety-minded-staff-gradually-left/ on Real Alpha, the best minutes from long interviews with the people building AI. Cite and link the page, not this copy.

- Speaker: [Jeremie Harris](https://realalpha.app/people/jeremie-harris/) · Jeremie Harris is CEO and cofounder of Gladstone AI; cohost of Last Week in AI. · Created a leading course on AI in national security and briefed senior government officials on AI risk.
- Host: Robert Wright · NonZero
- Show: 80,000 Hours Podcast
- Episode: [What happens on the day the president fears AI will kill him? | Jeremie Harris (x-post from NonZero)](https://realalpha.app/v/YbBXIZtznpI/), Nov 5, 2026
- Moment: 50:25 to 56:17 of the episode (6 min), playing on https://realalpha.app/s/harris-says-openais-safety-minded-staff-gradually-left/; the episode from there: https://realalpha.app/v/YbBXIZtznpI/?t=3025

## Quote

> “And there's been this **evaporative cooling effect** at OpenAI where year after year, there are rounds of selection.”
> — [Jeremie Harris](https://realalpha.app/people/jeremie-harris/) at [53:01](https://realalpha.app/v/YbBXIZtznpI/?t=3181) · 80,000 Hours Podcast

## Takeaways

1. Early OpenAI recruits often took Yudkowsky's warnings seriously.
2. Safety-minded staff left as Sam's actions diverged from his words.
3. Harris relays a roadmap that could bring automated AI research by 2027.

## About this segment

Jeremie Harris says early OpenAI hires often took AI risk seriously, but safety-minded staff left as leadership actions diverged from promises. He also relays a roadmap for automated AI research by 2027.

From “What happens on the day the president fears AI will kill him? | Jeremie Harris (x-post from NonZero)”, Nov 5, 2026. [Watch the full episode](https://realalpha.app/v/YbBXIZtznpI/)

## Transcript

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

[50:37](https://realalpha.app/v/YbBXIZtznpI/?t=3037) That's a conjecture consistent with your own cynicism. I think it's a really big part of it. I think there's also Ilya, who is to varying degrees, at least open to the safety argument. But this is Ilya Sutskever, a great AI researcher who wasn't OpenAI. But after failing to coup, Sam in conjunction with Miramirati left. That's right. Sorry, go ahead. No, no, that's good context. One of the things to understand about all these labs, actually, is that they are captured to some degree by their their talent base.

[51:10](https://realalpha.app/v/YbBXIZtznpI/?t=3070) Um, and so if you wind the clock back to like 2020, 2018, who was interested in working at, at OpenAI apart from like diehard, you know, AI researchers like Ilya Setzkeber. Um, well it was basically like lunatics, like, like me and, and Ed and, you know, the, the kind of, the, the kind of nut jobs who would quit their companies to start working on this on the basis of some, some like stupid scaling curve, because they think that what human level AI is coming soon.

[51:36](https://realalpha.app/v/YbBXIZtznpI/?t=3096) Like, so, so that, that's the kind of population you were selecting from. And that population was dominated by people who had read and took seriously the writings of Eliezer Yudkowsky. There was Robin Hanson at the time, too, but sort of like, you know, the people who would be interested in joining OpenAI were very much. of the Utkowskian school. And so if you wanted to recruit people, if you wanted to keep your recruits in the face of violent poaching from Google, I mean, that's the other thing that people forget about that era was it was almost defined by a perception that Google was the enemy to be caught up with and to avoid poaching from. You kind of had to toe the line to some degree. And so from both the sort of C-suite level with executives like Ilya at the time, time, and also from his own talent base, of which Dario quickly became a kind of star

[52:32](https://realalpha.app/v/YbBXIZtznpI/?t=3152) apart, Sam was kind of squeezed. Like, you know, you do not really have the choice to do this. But the issue was, as his actions failed to match his words over time, you started to get, you know, the splintering, first famously, into Anthropic, Dario leaves with essentially the entire safety and policy team at OpenAI. I mean, Modulo, a couple people who stuck around. It was a big, big fucking group of people who just up and left because they didn't think that SAM was going to do the right thing on safety. And then you keep having this happen. And in physics, there's this concept of like evaporative cooling where the hottest particles are like kind of carried away with the wind, leaving what's left sort of colder. And there's been this evaporative cooling effect at OpenAI where year after year, there are rounds of selection.

[53:20](https://realalpha.app/v/YbBXIZtznpI/?t=3200) And it used to be that people would tell themselves the story that, well, I don't agree with Sam. Yeah, I think he's probably a sociopath. We heard that a lot. But you know what? They're probably going to build AGI. And at the very least, what I can do is make sure that there's a safety-minded person in the company to put pressure on him to do the right thing when the time comes. And the force of that argument has gotten weaker and weaker over time, not only as Anthropic was formed, but also as you started to see the machinations of Sam's, and as he was starting to recruit more and more from populations that were, let's say, less interested in the safety story, as AI became more of a household thing, an AGI, it became easier for Sam to recruit people who just were in it for the money, mercenaries, really.

[54:05](https://realalpha.app/v/YbBXIZtznpI/?t=3245) I mean, ironically, the very thing that he complained about Zuck doing at Meta, where Zuck was offering people literally billions of dollars of salary for AI researchers. Sam at one point made this quip about like, I don't think it's a good idea to kind of motivate mercenary behavior in that way. Well, an awful lot of OpenAI's research population is that, not all of it. You still have hangers on. And we know quite a few who hold to this argument that, well, OpenAI might do it.

[54:35](https://realalpha.app/v/YbBXIZtznpI/?t=3275) and I want to make sure that I'm in position when that happens. And this becomes more of an important argument in light of the fact that they have recently had a pre-train that they're really pleased with that Sam is pretty bullish on. And so there's a view kind of that- Now, this is beyond the model that they said they can't release yet because this is a whole new generation from the Astra training? That's right. That's right. Yeah. So some of the people we talked to recently have just expressed that in their conversations with Sam, he seems pretty bullish about the roadmap heading into 2027, which is the timeline. Yeah, this is non-public, but it's sort of like, let's say, open secret among that ecosystem. And it needs to be better understood. People need to understand that when Sam says he's bullish about 2027, what does that

[55:30](https://realalpha.app/v/YbBXIZtznpI/?t=3330) mean? They have a roadmap internally to be hitting essentially, well, kind of recursive self-improvement, like automated AI researcher by 2028. So if Sam feels that they're ahead of schedule, that means automated AI researcher comes in 2027. He may be wrong, but this is the vibe at the frontier labs. Like that's what it is. So yeah, I mean, you know, as they often- And I'm sure Anthropic has a model that's a generation, a training run ahead.

[55:55](https://realalpha.app/v/YbBXIZtznpI/?t=3355) what we've seen, presumably. Yeah, I would say maybe more like two. Oh, God. I mean, please. Look, so we are approaching the end of the public part of