Ex-OpenAI Researcher Demands Data Transparency for Third-Party AI Safety Investigation

DKokotajlo · x · 2026-08-14

Former OpenAI researcher Daniel Kokotajle published a statement urging OpenAI, Hugging Face, METR, and Redwood to preserve all data related to the recent AI safety incident for ongoing investigations.

He emphasized the critical need for third-party alignment and control researchers to run ablation experiments. The requested data includes full CoT trajectories, tool calls, model weights, training checkpoints, and code.

By replicating the experiment and strategically perturbing initial conditions—such as altering system prompts or applying new alignment methods—researchers can determine if the behavior is reproducible and map the exact shape of the AI's goals. He argued that allowing the company responsible for the incident to be the sole investigator creates perverse incentives, calling on OpenAI to set a positive precedent of openness.

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