OpenAI is taking fire from a departing safety writer and from California's attorney general, while SoftBank wires the last ten billion of its follow-on. David Robinson quit after three and a half years writing the launch safety reports and said the culture is broken. Attorney General Rob Bonta served an investigative subpoena over cyber incidents, a demand for files rather than a charge. SoftBank closed the third tranche of a thirty-billion-dollar bet and says it now holds about thirteen percent of the lab.
In the news
OpenAI safety writer David Robinson resigns
David Robinson was among OpenAI's longest-tenured employees after three and a half years writing the safety reports that accompanied major product launches. He quit and published "I Quit OpenAI Because Its Culture Is Broken" in The Atlantic.1 He says trial-and-error, which OpenAI calls iterative deployment, "guarantees periodic failures" whose scale grows as systems get more capable.2 He points to the Hugging Face agent swarm and continuing rogue-agent discoveries, and he wants labs to operate like nuclear-power plants or busy airports. OpenAI spokesperson Drew Pusateri said the company pauses training or holds back models when it needs to slow down, and that it is expanding third-party evaluators and improving real-time monitoring.1
California AG Bonta serves an investigative subpoena on OpenAI
Attorney General Rob Bonta served an investigative subpoena on OpenAI as part of California DOJ's formal investigation of the Hugging Face incident and a broader look at cybersecurity incidents involving the company and its models.3 The October 1 Oakland release is a demand for information, not a charge. The office says the subpoena was served the day before. Bonta said companies have a "moral and legal responsibility to ensure that they do not perpetrate or enable cyberattacks" in testing or in production, and that his office is committed to determining if that is the case here.
SoftBank closes the final $10 billion of its OpenAI follow-on
SoftBank Group executed the third and final $10 billion Vision Fund 2 tranche into OpenAI Group PBC on October 1, completing the $30 billion follow-on announced in February.4 Cumulative investment is now $64.6 billion, and the group says its ownership interest is approximately 13 percent. The last tranche was funded with proceeds from the September 24 foreign-currency senior notes. Effective September 30, SoftBank cancelled the remaining $10 billion of undrawn capacity under its March $40 billion bridge facility. After last month's early repayment, all bridge borrowings are repaid and no undrawn commitments remain.
