OpenAI CEO Sam Altman speaks during the Microsoft Build conference at Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Washington, on May 21, 2024.
Jason Redmond | AFP | Getty Images
A group of current and former OpenAI employees published an open letter Tuesday describing concerns about the artificial intelligence industry’s rapid advancement despite a lack of oversight and an absence of whistleblower protections for those who wish to speak up.
“AI companies have strong financial incentives to avoid effective oversight, and we do not believe bespoke structures of corporate governance are sufficient to change this,” the employees wrote in the open letter.
OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Meta and other companies are at the helm of a generative AI arms race — a market that is predicted to top $1 trillion in revenue within a decade — as companies in seemingly every industry rush to add AI-powered chatbots and agents to avoid being left behind by competitors.
The current and former employees wrote AI companies have “substantial non-public information” about what their technology can do, the extent of the safety measures they’ve put in place and the risk levels that technology has for different types of harm.
“We also understand the serious risks posed by these technologies,” they wrote, adding that the companies “currently have only weak obligations to share some of this information with governments, and none with civil society. We do not think they can all be relied upon to share it voluntarily.”
The letter also details the current and former employees’ concerns about insufficient whistleblower protections for the AI industry, stating that without effective government oversight, employees are in a relatively unique position to hold companies accountable.
“Broad confidentiality agreements block us from voicing our concerns, except to the very companies that may be failing to address these issues,” the signatories wrote. “Ordinary whistleblower protections are insufficient because they focus on illegal activity, whereas many of the risks we are concerned about are not yet regulated.”
The letter asks AI companies to commit to not entering or enforcing non-disparagement agreements; to create anonymous processes for current and former employees to voice concerns to a company’s board, regulators and others; to support a culture of open criticism; and to not retaliate against public whistleblowing if internal reporting processes fail.
Four anonymous OpenAI employees and seven former ones, including Daniel Kokotajlo, Jacob Hilton, William Saunders, Carroll Wainwright and Daniel Ziegler, signed the letter. Signatories also included Ramana Kumar, who formerly worked at Google DeepMind, and Neel Nanda, who currently works at Google DeepMind and formerly worked at Anthropic. Three famed computer scientists known for advancing the artificial intelligence field also endorsed the letter: Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio and Stuart Russell.
“We agree that rigorous debate is crucial given the significance of this technology and we’ll continue to engage with governments, civil society and other communities around the world,” an OpenAI spokesperson told CNBC, adding that the company has an anonymous integrity hotline, as well as a Safety and Security Committee led by members of the board and OpenAI leaders.
Microsoft declined to comment.
Mounting controversy for OpenAI
Last month, OpenAI backtracked on a controversial decision to make former employees choose between signing a non-disparagement agreement that would never expire, or keeping their vested equity in the company. The internal memo, viewed by CNBC, was sent to former employees and shared with current ones.
The memo, addressed to each former employee, said that at the time of the person’s departure from OpenAI, “you may have been informed that you were required to execute a general release agreement that included a non-disparagement provision in order to retain the Vested Units [of equity].”
“We’re incredibly sorry that we’re only changing this language now; it doesn’t reflect our values or the company we want to be,” an OpenAI spokesperson told CNBC at the time.
Tuesday’s open letter also follows OpenAI’s decision last month to disband its team focused on the long-term risks of AI just one year after the Microsoft-backed startup announced the group, a person familiar with the situation confirmed to CNBC at the time.
The person, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said some of the team members are being reassigned to multiple other teams within the company.
The team’s disbandment followed team leaders, OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever and Jan Leike, announcing their departures from the startup last month. Leike wrote in a post on X that OpenAI’s “safety culture and processes have taken a backseat to shiny products.”
Ilya Sutskever, Russian Israeli-Canadian computer scientist and co-founder and Chief Scientist of OpenAI, speaks at Tel Aviv University in Tel Aviv on June 5, 2023.
Jack Guez | AFP | Getty Images
CEO Sam Altman said on X he was sad to see Leike leave and that the company had more work to do. Soon after, OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman posted a statement attributed to himself and Altman on X, asserting that the company has “raised awareness of the risks and opportunities of AGI so that the world can better prepare for it.”
“I joined because I thought OpenAI would be the best place in the world to do this research,” Leike wrote on X. “However, I have been disagreeing with OpenAI leadership about the company’s core priorities for quite some time, until we finally reached a breaking point.”
Leike wrote he believes much more of the company’s bandwidth should be focused on security, monitoring, preparedness, safety and societal impact.
“These problems are quite hard to get right, and I am concerned we aren’t on a trajectory to get there,” he wrote. “Over the past few months my team has been sailing against the wind. Sometimes we were struggling for [computing resources] and it was getting harder and harder to get this crucial research done.”
Leike added that OpenAI must become a “safety-first AGI company.”
“Building smarter-than-human machines is an inherently dangerous endeavor,” he wrote. “OpenAI is shouldering an enormous responsibility on behalf of all of humanity. But over the past years, safety culture and processes have taken a backseat to shiny products.”
The high-profile departures come months after OpenAI went through a leadership crisis involving Altman.
In November, OpenAI’s board ousted Altman, saying in a statement that Altman had not been “consistently candid in his communications with the board.”
The issue seemed to grow more complex each day, with The Wall Street Journal and other media outlets reporting that Sutskever trained his focus on ensuring that artificial intelligence would not harm humans, while others, including Altman, were instead more eager to push ahead with delivering new technology.
Altman’s ouster prompted resignations or threats of resignations, including an open letter signed by virtually all of OpenAI’s employees, and uproar from investors, including Microsoft. Within a week, Altman was back at the company, and board members Helen Toner, Tasha McCauley and Ilya Sutskever, who had voted to oust Altman, were out. Sutskever stayed on staff at the time but no longer in his capacity as a board member. Adam D’Angelo, who had also voted to oust Altman, remained on the board.
American actress Scarlett Johansson at Cannes Film Festival 2023. Photocall of the film Asteroid City. Cannes (France), May 24th, 2023
Meanwhile, last month, OpenAI launched a new AI model and desktop version of ChatGPT, along with an updated user interface and audio capabilities, the company’s latest effort to expand the use of its popular chatbot. One week after OpenAI debuted the range of audio voices, the company announced it would pull one of the viral chatbot’s voices named “Sky.”
“Sky” created controversy for resembling the voice of actress Scarlett Johansson in “Her,” a movie about artificial intelligence. The Hollywood star has alleged that OpenAI ripped off her voice even though she declined to let them use it.
Ben Powell, chief strategist for Middle East and Asia Pacific at BlackRock Investment Institute, during a Bloomberg Television interview at the Abu Dhabi Finance Week (ADFW) conference in Abu Dhabi, AD, United Arab Emirates, on Monday, Dec. 9, 2024.
Bloomberg | Getty Images
The wave of capital pouring into artificial intelligence infrastructure is far from peaking, said Ben Powell, chief investment strategist for APAC at BlackRock, arguing the sector’s “picks and shovels” suppliers — from chipmakers to energy producers and copper-wire manufacturers — remain the clearest winners as hyperscalers race to outspend one another.
The surge in AI-related capital expenditure shows no sign of slowing as tech giants push aggressively to secure an edge in what they see as a winner-takes-all contest, Powell told CNBC Monday on the sidelines of the Abu Dhabi Finance Week.
“The capex deluge continues. The money is very, very clear,” he said, adding that BlackRock is focused on what he called a “traditional picks and shovels capex super boom, which still feels like it’s got more to go.”
AI infrastructure has been one of the biggest drivers of global investment this year, fueling a broader market rally, even as some investors question how long the boom can last.
Nvidia, whose GPU chips are the backbone of the AI revolution, became the first company to briefly surpass $5 trillion in market capitalization amid a dizzying AI-fueled market rally that sparked talk of an AI bubble.
The build-out has set off long-term procurement efforts across the tech sector, from chip supply agreements to power commitments. Grid operators from the U.S. to the Middle East are racing to meet soaring electricity demand from new data centers. Companies, including Amazon and Meta, have budgeted tens of billions of dollars annually for AI-related investments.
S&P Global estimates data-center power demand could nearly double by 2030, mostly driven by hyperscale, enterprise and leased facilities, along with crypto-mining sites.
‘Dipping toes into credit market’
Powell also noted that leading tech firms have only begun to tap capital markets to fund the next phase of AI expansion, suggesting additional capital is on the way.
“The big companies have only just started dipping their toes into the credit markets… feels like there’s a lot more they can do there,” he said.
The “hyperscalers” are behaving as if coming second would effectively leave them out of the market, Powell said. That mindset, he added, has pushed firms to accelerate spending even at the risk of overshooting.
Much of that capital, Powell noted, is likely to flow to the companies powering the AI build-out rather than model developers, reinforcing a growing view among global investors that the most durable gains from the AI boom may lie in the hardware, energy and infrastructure ecosystems behind the technology.
“If we’re the recipients of that cash flow, I guess that’s a pretty good place to be, whether you’re making chips, whether you’re making energy all the way down to the copper wiring,” Powell noted, expecting “positive surprises driving those stocks in the year ahead.”
Netflix’s headquarters are pictured in Hollywood, California on December 5, 2025.
Patrick T. Fallon | Afp | Getty Images
“Who’s watching?” Netflix asks whenever someone accesses its site. On Friday, it was probably everyone with an interest in business, markets and television.
The key characters that had people hooked were Netflix and Warner Bros. Discovery, which jointly announced that the streaming giant will acquire the latter’s film studio and streaming service, HBO Max. The equity deal value is pegged at $72 billion.
Netflix investors did not seem too jazzed about the deal, with shares dropping 2.89% on the sheer size of the transaction.
“Look, the math is going to hurt Netflix for a while. There’s no doubt,” Rich Greenfield, co-founder of LightShed Partners, told CNBC. “This is expensive,” he added.
But if one side is paying a lot, that means the other is receiving a bounty. Indeed, investors cheered the potential Warner Bros. Discovery windfall, sending the stock up 6.3% on the news.
It is not a done deal yet, and faces regulatory scrutiny. U.S. President Donald Trump said he would be involved in the decision, Reuters reported Monday, after a senior official from the Trump administration told CNBC’s Eamon Javers on Friday that they viewed the deal with “heavy scepticism.”
Despite this initial show of resistance, stranger things have happened in this administration, and the transaction might eventually go through. We may as well get ready for Netflix’s next blockbuster: “The K-Pop Demon Hunters’ Song of Ice and Fire”?
What you need to know today
U.S. stocks had a positive Friday. The S&P 500 clocked its ninth winning session in 10 and rose 0.3% for the week. Asia-Pacific markets traded mixed Monday. Japan’s Nikkei 225 ticked up even as data showed the country’s economy shrinking more than expected in the third quarter.
Netflix to buy Warner Bros. Discovery’s film and streaming businesses. The total equity value of the deal is $72 billion, announced the two companies Friday. But the transaction could run intoregulatory hurdles.
China’s exports grow more than expected. In U.S. dollar terms, shipments in November jumped 5.9% year on year, outstripping the 3.8% increase estimated in a Reuters poll and returning to growth from October’s 1.1% drop. But U.S.-bound exports plunged 28.6%.
A Ukraine peace deal is ‘really close.’ That’s according to Keith Kellogg, the U.S. special envoy for Ukraine, who reportedly said Saturday that there were two key outstanding issues: the future of Ukraine’s Donbas region and its Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant.
[PRO] Have $1 million to invest? The current investment landscape might look volatile. But veteran strategists suggest that the path forward is more straightforward than it seems, advising how they would craft a $1 million portfolio.
And finally…
A construction workers paints an eagle on the Marriner S. Eccles Federal Reserve Board Building, the main offices of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, on Sept. 16, 2025 in Washington, DC.
Elon Musk has called for the European Union to be abolished after the bloc fined his social media company X 120 million euros ($140 million) for a “deceptive” blue checkmark and lack of transparency of its advertising repository.
The European Commission hit X with the ruling on Friday following a two-year investigation into the company under the Digital Services Act (DSA), which was adopted in 2022 to regulate online platforms. At the time, in a reply on X to a post from the Commission, Musk wrote, “Bulls—.”
On Saturday he stepped up his criticism of the bloc. “The EU should be abolished and sovereignty returned to individual countries, so that governments can better represent their people,” he said in a post on X.
Musk’s comments come as top U.S. government officials have also intensified their opposition to the decision.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio called the fine an “attack on all American tech platforms and the American people by foreign governments,” in a post on X on Friday.
“Today’s excessive €120M fine is the result of EU regulatory overreach targeting American innovation,” said Andrew Puzder, the U.S. ambassador to the EU, on X on Saturday.
“The Trump Administration has been clear: we oppose censorship and will challenge burdensome regulations that target US companies abroad. We expect the EU to engage in fair, open, & reciprocal trade — & nothing less.”
Last week, the Commission said breaches included “the deceptive design of its ‘blue checkmark,’ the lack of transparency of its advertising repository, and the failure to provide access to public data for researchers.”
“With the DSA’s first non-compliance decision, we are holding X responsible for undermining users’ rights and evading accountability,” said Henna Virkkunen, executive vice president for tech sovereignty, security and democracy, at the time.
X now has 60 days to inform the Commission of plans to address the issues with “deceptive” blue checkmarks. It has 90 days to submit a plan to resolve the issues with its ads repository and access to its public data for researchers.
“Failure to comply with the non-compliance decision may lead to periodic penalty payments,” the Commission said in a statement.
X.ai, the company which owns X, and the Commission have been approached for comment. oh
