A coalition of employees from leading AI organizations including OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Anthropic is advocating for revolutionary policies to protect whistleblowers in the AI industry. Their collective action articulates the gravity of unregulated AI advancement and the threats it may pose to humanity, ranging from entrenched inequalities to potential human extinction.

The group's manifesto demands protection for employees who raise alarms about AI safety concerns, aiming to ensure a more responsible discourse around AI technologies. This endeavor calls for robust whistleblower protections, including safe anonymous reporting and the exhaustion of internal grievance procedures before escalating concerns publicly.

Among the grumbles are the predatory non-disclosure and non-disparagement agreements, which are alleged to silence critical voices—a notion rejected by OpenAI, which insists they already provide avenues for concerns and foster rigorous debate necessary for AI's evolution.

The outcry has drawn the attention of academia, with AI luminaries Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton, and Stuart Russell endorsing the whistleblowers' proposals. Their call to arms extends beyond the walls of the tech companies to the public sphere, urging a collaborative action plan that includes independent experts, governments, and the public, to reconcile the promise and perils of AI.

Amidst this turmoil, high-profile resignations from OpenAI's superalignment safety team and the disbanding of a nasophonium safety committee add layers of complexity to the already muddled path toward ethical AI development.