Former OpenAI employees and a former board member testified at the ongoing Musk v. Altman trial in Oakland on Thursday that the company's push to launch AI products compromised its commitment to safety. Rosie Campbell, who joined OpenAI's AGI readiness team in 2021 and left in 2024 after her team was disbanded, testified that the organization shifted from research-focused to product-focused, citing an incident where Microsoft deployed GPT-4 in India through Bing before the model had been evaluated by the company's Deployment Safety Board. Former board member Tasha McCauley testified about concerns that CEO Sam Altman was not forthcoming enough with the board, including a pattern of misleading board members and failing to inform them about the decision to launch ChatGPT publicly. McCauley also said the failures of internal governance at OpenAI should be a reason to embrace stronger government regulation of advanced AI, saying that “if it all comes down to one CEO making those decisions, and we have the public good at stake, that's very suboptimal.”
