OpenAI safety transparency lead David Robinson reportedly resigns

David Robinson, who led safety transparency work on OpenAI’s Safety Systems team, has resigned, according to a post on X. OpenAI has not publicly confirmed the departure. The timing is awkward. Robinson’s exit reportedly came in late September or early October 2026, the same stretch in which three safety researchers were reportedly terminated. What Robinson did, and when he left Robinson’s job was to explain OpenAI’s risks to the public. His role covered system cards and public disclosures about risks and incidents. System cards are the technical documents a lab publishes alongside a model. Think of them as the nutrition label: what the model can do, what it was tested for, and where it might go wrong. His professional profiles show him active in that transparency work up until mid-September 2026. Sometime after that, the profile changed. That change lined up with a Wall Street Journal report on October 1, 2026. The Journal reported that three safety researchers had been let go. The researchers were alleged to have mishandled sensitive information and shared it with an outside AI-safety organization. Outside OpenAI, Robinson is also known as an author. He wrote Voices in the Code, ...