#21 Steven Adler on scruntising AI company safety practices & pacing the frontier - Consistently Candid | Lyssna här

After a long hiatus, I am resurrecting my podcast! For this episode, I spoke with Steven Adler. Steven worked on policy and safety at OpenAI between 2020 and 2024. He has since left to pursue independent writing to raise public awareness about AI risks and co-founded Guidelight AI, an organisation focused on scrutinising and improving safety practices at major AI companies. Guidelight was one of two organisations instrumental in spearheading the Pacing the Frontier open letter, which has garnered 1300+ signatories from employees at frontier labs. It has also published a scorecard of AI control practices across OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, Google, and xAI.

Topics covered in the episode:

Why Steven left OpenAI in 2024 — o1, NDAs, safety staff turnover
Counterarguments to AI pessimism, and where Steven's cruxes lie
The OpenAI–Hugging Face incident and OpenAI's response
AI control: monitoring, prevention, and whether it scales to superintelligence
Why incident reporting is inadequate, and communicating risk when nothing visibly bad has happened
Where AI policy stands: SB 53, RAISE, Illinois, the EU AI Act, and how weak enforcement is
Companies quietly diluting their own safety commitments
The Pacing the Frontier letter, what "pacing" means and how it's landing
Guidelight's control scorecard: method, findings, and theory of change