OpenAI employees flag internal bottlenecks by writing to an address called friction@, which leadership triages and escalates to Sam Altman or Greg Brockman when the issue seems big enough, according to Emily Forlini at Fortune. Complaints run from technical systems that don’t work to office gripes about parking, which produced a pilot handing priority spots to long commuters. The address existed for years but only took hold in late 2025, when Fidji Simo arrived as CEO of Applications and put structure around it, assigning VP Irina Kofman to watch the inbox and posting monthly progress updates in Slack. Simo left in early July and the process continues. One former team lead who fielded dozens of these said they land as drop-everything fire drills on teams that are already underwater.
