“The Safety Culture at the Labs is Broken” by Zvi

We need the frontier labs to have a deep and robust safety culture.

Alas, this is not the case.

Anthropic devotes considerable effort to cultivating and maintaining such a culture. It shows, especially among the members of technical staff. Having conversations with them can be a very different experience than talking to those at other labs, and there is a much greater sense of understanding and responsibility. But even there, the appreciation of the problems and their difficulties seem woefully insufficient. We see various symptoms of that more and more.

Recently, while I’ve had some good interactions, I’ve also had interactions that make clear that much of Anthropic does not share that same safety culture, with a lot of ‘oh we will muddle through because we are better at operational excellence unlike those other idiots’ and a belief that all the problems are prosaic. Culture is hard.

Then there are OpenAI's cultural problems, which clearly run deeper. That point was only driven further home this week, with David Robinson resigning to blow the whistle, and OpenAI feeling forced to fire three of its safety researchers, on top of many past problems and incidents.

That [...]

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Outline:

(02:05) David Robinson Blows the Whistle

(10:05) The Preference Cascade Continues

(18:05) Perhaps It Is Time To Quit

(18:37) The Lab Strategy of Prosaic Safety is Insufficient

(22:11) Misaligned! (At Anthropic)

(33:22) Misaligned! (At OpenAI)

(38:52) Hugging the Face

(39:13) You're Fired

(40:26) They Are Not Ready To Make a Commitment

(42:10) Words of Warning

(43:24) Conclusions Not to Jump To

(44:00) The Lighter Side

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First published:
October 14th, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Azqs8XD75k4F9f7ua/the-safety-culture-at-the-labs-is-broken

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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