Ex-DeepMind researcher who lost $300k+ quitting rebuts claim labs silence extinction-risk talk
repligate · x · 2026-09-12
After Qiaochu Yuan joked that people would take existential risk more seriously if OpenAI and Anthropic gagged employees, John Wentworth (@TurnTrout) pushed back: he quit Google DeepMind, forfeiting $300k+, to call out harms over autonomous weapons, and notes GDM doesn't actually want to stoke extinction fears — a revealing exchange about lab suppression narratives vs. individual practice in AI safety.
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