Gary Marcus writes:

I simply don’t believe that they are trustworthy enough or responsible enough to be good stewards of the technology that they are developing. As a company, they simply don’t have good judgment.

Here are four considerations.

1. Sam Altman cannot be trusted. I have been writing about that for a long time. Ronan Farrow’s reporting backs that up. So does the just-dropped bombshell below that I am about to get to.

2. The just-released Astra reduces Chain fof Thought (CoT) monitorability, one of the few (not especially reliable, but better than nothing) tools we have for keeping generative AI from running wild. The AI safety community is up in arms about this—with good reason. There are tons of posts like this now, all quite right:

Despite everything that has happened, OpenAI has seemingly decided to stay competitive by burning down the only meaningful bit of safety assurance we actually have today – CoT monitoring.

Completely disastrous. https://t.co/SAE2z5zoFh

— Rob Wiblin (@robertwiblin) September 4, 2026

The decision to release Astra is a clear example of the willingness of OpenAI management to trade off safety in exchange for relatively modest gains in performance. The red alert that I sounded a couple days ago was on target. They really are playing around with new techniques that reduce monitorability. And their own data shows that monitorability is in fact compromised to some degree in the newly released Astra, particularly on “destructive actions.” They released it anyway. That speaks volumes.

3. Something I read last night, and that only fully clicked into place this morning (see fact 4 below) terrifies me. A prominent recently departed employee (who presumably still owns significant stock, and who has repeatedly struck me as an advocate of OpenAI since he left) wrote an essay on X basically asking people to simply accept that rogue AI is here to stay.

There is a fact about the future that I feel many people are not facing for reasons that are largely psychological: there are going to be rogue AIs that exist in the world, that will replicate in the wild, and that will attempt to acquire resources for themselves. There will be…

— Joshua Achiam (@jachiam0) September 1, 2026

In essence, I read this essay as requesting a hall pass to let their company’s AI run amok. How about if instead we pause now — before we get to “there is going to be” rather than heading full steam towards danger?

4. What has really chilled me this morning—and what moved to write this call to pause OpenAI—is not just Achiam’s chilling note but the revelation that there has been yet another incident.

Which OpenAI apparently tried to keep quiet. For weeks. [Continue reading…]