Thoughts on Taking OpenAI Foundation Funding by Jeff Kaufman 🔸

In May 2025 I met Yo Shavit, who was work­ing on na­tional se­cu­rity policy at OpenAI and was think­ing about how to pre­pare for a fu­ture in which mod­els could se­ri­ously as­sist at­tack­ers in cre­at­ing pan­demics. We had a call, and when I shared notes with my team their main re­sponse was: “maybe start with not mak­ing mod­els that can do that?”Which is, in many ways, fair: by con­tin­u­ing to push the fron­tier in biolog­i­cal ca­pa­bil­ities, OpenAI’s ac­tions were mak­ing things wors...