Cyber Veterans Say Altman, Amodei Shut Them Out of Safety Plans

Cybersecurity veterans told NBC News that OpenAI and Anthropic are keeping them out of the very safety planning meant to head off catastrophic hacking scenarios, even as CEOs Sam Altman and Dario Amodei call publicly for the industry to slow down.

The complaint from the experts, per Kevin Collier's September 15 story, is that "fundamental issues of cybersecurity weren't being addressed" in the AI giants' safety initiatives. "Why haven't they called in the experts by now?" is the question they are posing back.

Altman and Amodei have said they are willing to invite independent safety experts inside their companies to help stem the risks that AI escapes human control, though they stopped short of announcing they would immediately slow or stop training of new models. Amodei's own three-part proposal, published as an essay titled "We Must Pace the Frontier," called for embedded independent evaluators, coordination among companies in democratic countries, and eventually an international agreement that includes China. The cybersecurity community, in Collier's telling, is not yet in the room where those plans are being drawn.