OpenAI capabilities researcher Dan Selsam makes public statement on AI risk
connoraxiotes · x · 2026-09-15
Dan Selsam, a current 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 15+ years in AI: probabilistic programming at MIT, early Lean theorem prover development at Microsoft Research, and early neural network reasoning work in his Stanford PhD.
- Commenters note he and fellow pretraining researcher Jacob Coxon are the people actively making models more powerful — not EA-aligned safety advocates — and recent events have genuinely freaked them out.
- The statement is being read as a notable signal of shifting sentiment inside frontier labs.
Related event: OpenAI Researcher Dan Selsam Publishes Personal AI Risk Statement(26 posts)→
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