“A Right to Warn about Advanced AI”
Current and former OpenAI and DeepMind employees demand whistleblower protections
Confirmed
The takeaway
On June 4, 2024, thirteen current and former employees of frontier AI companies (mostly OpenAI, plus Google DeepMind and Anthropic alumni), six of them anonymous, published “A Right to Warn about Advanced Artificial Intelligence”.
Status
- Claim
Confirmed
- Our reporting
- High confidence
- Importance
- 3 of 5
- Last verified
- 29 September 2026
Your AI and this story
- GPT-6 AstraIn its training data
- Claude Opus 5.5In its training data
- Gemini 4 HydrogenIn its training data
- Grok 4.7In its training data
It happened before the cutoffs of all four assistants, so it can be in their training data.
Key facts
- Published June 4, 2024 at righttowarn.ai
- Named signers include Jacob Hilton, Daniel Kokotajlo, William Saunders, Carroll Wainwright, Daniel Ziegler (formerly OpenAI), Ramana Kumar (formerly Google DeepMind) and Neel Nanda (Google DeepMind, formerly Anthropic); six signed anonymously
- Endorsed by Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton and Stuart Russell
- Four principles: no enforcement of agreements that bar risk-related criticism; verifiably anonymous reporting process; a culture of open criticism; no retaliation for going public once other processes fail
- Came weeks after the Superalignment departures and reports on OpenAI’s equity-linked non-disparagement terms
What happened
Lab insiders publicly argued that, without effective government oversight, employees are among the few people able to hold AI companies accountable, and that confidentiality agreements were silencing them.
Why it matters
It set the template for employee-led collective statements at frontier labs, which culminated in the July 2026 ‘Pacing the Frontier’ statement signed by more than 1,100 lab employees.
Sources
1 source from 1 site. Numbers match the chips in the text.
1 source: 1 primary
Primary
- A Right to Warn about Advanced Artificial Intelligencerighttowarn.ai, official
Changes
- Filed (primary source checked)
