OpenAI capabilities researcher Dan Selsam issues public statement on AI risk, warns humans losing ownership of model-driven research
Miles_Brundage · x · 2026-09-15
Dan Selsam, an OpenAI capabilities researcher since 2022 who helped pioneer chain-of-thought optimization, has published a personal statement on AI risk via former colleague Daniel Kokotajlo (Selsam has no Twitter account).
- Selsam has 15+ years in AI: early probabilistic programming work at MIT, early development of the Lean Theorem Prover at Microsoft Research, and one of the first demos of neural networks learning to reason during his Stanford PhD.
- His core warning: "human researchers are losing the ability and the will to take true ownership of model-driven research."
- A rare public risk statement from a serving capabilities researcher at a frontier lab, now circulating widely in AI safety circles.
Related event: OpenAI Researcher Dan Selsam Publishes Personal AI Risk Statement(26 posts)→
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