Miles Brundage: Discrete AI Safety Gains Just Get Reinvested Into New Risks

Miles_Brundage · x · 2026-09-17

Former OpenAI policy lead Miles Brundage argues that, as in aviation and nuclear safety, discrete safety improvements in AI are never enough: people "reinvest" the gains into new risky behavior (seatbelt → drive faster). In AI, that reinvestment means bigger pretraining runs, harder RL environments, more test-time compute, and less restricted internet access — with no clear capability ceiling where companies declare victory.

Related event: Ex-OpenAI Policy Chief: Piecemeal Safety Gains Get Reinvested Into New Risks(2 posts)→

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