AI transparency and the freedom to publish
In October 2024, Miles Brundage announced that he was leaving OpenAI in part to gain more freedom to publish. He thought some restrictions were reasonable inside a company, but said they had become too limiting for the work he wanted to do.
Brundage’s account, October 23, 2024: Why he was leaving OpenAI
His explanation was not a blanket rejection of OpenAI; he also wrote positively about the work being done there. It illustrates why transparency concerns need to be read closely. A wish to publish more freely is different from an allegation that a company concealed information.
The departures
14 documented departures. In these cases, the person’s own account or independent reporting connects the departure to a concern about transparency. The count covers this collection; it is not a measure of how open a company is.
Bilal Chughtai
Explicitly statedResearch Engineer, Language Model Interpretability (Google DeepMind) · Google
Research engineer on Google DeepMind's language-model interpretability team who resigned in 2026. In his September statement, Chughtai said he was “extremely concerned” by the default trajectory of AI. He warned that capabilities were advancing faster than alignment research, that misaligned superintelligence could permanently disempower or kill humanity, and that AI companies needed to coordinate, slow the pace of development, and disclose more about the risks they impose.
Profile and sources →Joe Benton
Explicitly statedMember of Technical Staff (Manager), Scalable Oversight · Anthropic
Manager of Anthropic's Scalable Oversight team who left in August 2026 to join the independent evaluator METR. Benton said frontier AI companies were racing toward recursively self-improving systems while underinvesting in safety, and warned that progress could become uncontrollable. He called for slower development, disclosure of safety incidents and capability gains, minimum safety standards, and independent assessments.
Profile and sources →Alex Turner
Explicitly statedResearch Scientist, Scalable Alignment (Google DeepMind) · Google
Research scientist on Google DeepMind's scalable alignment team who resigned after Google signed an agreement allowing the Pentagon to use its AI for classified work. Turner said the agreement lacked binding restrictions against autonomous weapons or mass surveillance, despite months of internal advocacy for enforceable safeguards. He wrote: “At that point, I couldn’t stay at Google in good conscience, so I left.”
Profile and sources →René Mayrhofer
Explicitly statedPrincipal Software Engineer, Android Security · Google
Principal software engineer for Android security and former director of Android Platform Security who resigned after Google agreed to provide AI for classified Pentagon use. Mayrhofer, a self-described pacifist, said the agreement could enable offensive military applications or mass surveillance and criticized the lack of internal debate or communication around the decision. He wrote that Google’s direction left him “with the only choice to resign.”
Profile and sources →Zoe Hitzig
Explicitly statedResearcher · OpenAI
Resigned over ChatGPT advertising plans. Wrote a New York Times op-ed warning that OpenAI would exploit users' intimate conversational data to serve targeted ads.
Profile and sources →Tom Cunningham
Explicitly statedEconomics Researcher · OpenAI
Left after concluding it had become difficult to publish research that didn't align with OpenAI's commercial interests. Accused the economic research team of functioning as a 'de facto advocacy arm' rather than conducting genuine research, specifically citing suppression of findings about AI's negative economic impacts.
Profile and sources →Miles Brundage
Explicitly statedSenior Advisor for AGI Readiness · OpenAI
Said 'Neither OpenAI nor any other frontier lab is ready' for AGI. Noted OpenAI placed increasingly restrictive limits on what he could publish. The AGI Readiness team was disbanded after his departure.
Profile and sources →Suchir Balaji
Explicitly statedResearch Scientist · OpenAI
Left over concerns about copyright law violations in ChatGPT's training data. Said 'If you believe what I believe, you have to just leave the company.' Became a public critic of OpenAI's use of copyrighted data.
Profile and sources →Gretchen Krueger
Explicitly statedPolicy Researcher · OpenAI
Policy researcher who resigned hours before Ilya Sutskever and Jan Leike announced their departures, writing that she made her decision independently and shared their concerns, along with "additional and overlapping" ones. She cited the need for better decision-making processes, accountability, transparency, documentation, and policy enforcement, and warned that one way tech companies disempower those seeking accountability is "to sow division among those raising concerns."
Profile and sources →Ed Newton-Rex
Explicitly statedVice President of Audio · Stability AI
Resigned because he disagreed with Stability AI's position that training generative AI models on copyrighted works constitutes 'fair use.' Wrote: 'Companies worth billions of dollars are training generative AI models on creators' works without permission... this is not acceptable.'
Profile and sources →Geoffrey Hinton
Explicitly statedVP and Engineering Fellow · Google
Resigned from Google in May 2023, saying he wanted to speak freely about the risks of AI and that a part of him regrets his life's work. In interviews from December 2024 onward — after his departure — he estimated a 10-20% probability that AI could lead to human extinction.
Profile and sources →El Mahdi El Mhamdi
Explicitly statedSenior Research Scientist · Google
Senior research scientist who resigned after Google refused to allow him to publish a paper critical of large AI models' security and privacy vulnerabilities. He cited research censorship, warned that the risks of modern AI "highly exceeded" the benefits, and released the blocked paper through École Polytechnique instead.
Profile and sources →Frances Haugen
Explicitly statedProduct Manager, Civic Integrity Team · Meta
Leaked tens of thousands of internal Facebook documents to the SEC and Wall Street Journal, revealing that Meta knew its algorithms amplified hate speech and harmed teen mental health. Testified before Congress. The Civic Integrity team was dissolved after the 2020 election.
Profile and sources →Timnit Gebru
Explicitly statedCo-Lead, Ethical AI Team · Google
Forced out after co-authoring a paper on the harms of large language models ('On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots'). Google objected to publication and demanded she retract or remove her name.
Profile and sources →
Unresolved allegations
These accounts allege a connection that remains disputed or unresolved. They are not included in the count above.
Leopold Aschenbrenner
Alleged retaliationResearcher, Superalignment Team · OpenAI
OpenAI fired Aschenbrenner, citing an alleged information leak. Aschenbrenner has said he believes a security memo he shared with board members — warning that OpenAI's security was insufficient to protect model weights — was a major factor. The competing accounts are unresolved. He later published 'Situational Awareness,' arguing AGI is imminent and labs are unprepared.
Profile and sources →
What the sources establish
The label on each profile tells you how the departure is connected to the concern: through the person’s own words, independent reporting, or an unresolved allegation. Grouping an account under transparency does not establish that a company withheld information or acted improperly.
A person may appear on more than one topic page, so the counts cannot be added together. Team changes have their own records.