OpenAI Safety Lead David Robinson Resigns, Warns Culture Has Become "Broken" Amid AI Race

David Robinson, who spent three and a half years building OpenAI's safety transparency framework, has resigned and warned that the company's culture is fundamentally broken, declaring that the era of trial-and-error development for increasingly powerful AI systems must end. Robinson, who led the creation of safety reports accompanying 12 major product launches and helped draft OpenAI's Preparedness Framework, published a detailed resignation essay in The Atlantic on October 3, 2026, arguing that frontier AI development can no longer proceed without the kind of layered safeguards and deliberate planning used in nuclear power plants and aviation.