Russell signed an open letter in March 2023 calling for a six-month pause in AI research. In a sign of the contradictions here, Musk also signed the same letter, even as he was launching xAI, his own for-profit AI lab.

Russell told jurors and Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers that there were a variety of risks associated with the development of AI, ranging from cybersecurity threats to problems with misalignment and the winner-take-all nature of developing artificial general intelligence (AGI). Ultimately, he said that there was a tension between the pursuit of AGI and safety.

Russell’s larger concerns about the existential threats of unconstrained AI didn’t get aired in open court after objections from OpenAI’s attorneys led the judge to limit Russell’s testimony. But Russell has long been a critic of the arms-race dynamic created by frontier labs around the globe competing to reach AGI first and called for governments to regulate the field more tightly.

OpenAI’s attorneys spent their cross-examination establishing that Russell wasn’t directly evaluating the organization’s corporate structure or its specific safety policies.