StarZero All shows Try the podcast clipper →

Steven Adler

Co-founder, Guidelight AI · 1 appearance on the record.

computed by AI from the episodes · how this works → · full disclaimer →

scientistfounderauthor@sjgadler ↗LinkedIn ↗stevenadler.substack.com ↗

From 2020 to 2024, Adler worked at OpenAI leading dangerous capability evaluations and product safety research before resigning to publicly warn about safety concerns. Today, he publishes the newsletter Clear-Eyed AI and co-founded Guidelight AI to evaluate safety benchmarks across frontier AI labs.

11statements → 7claims → 5claims resolved → 60%fully supported → 3.55/5average certainty → 2.82/5average debate potential → ≈4.5/5argument clarity, estimated →

3 supported 1 partly supported 1 contradicted 1 not yet assessed 1 not checkable as stated how the 7 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

7 assertions · 1 opinion · 3 insights · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 7 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 5 are resolved, 1 is not yet assessed, and 1 names no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Steven argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Their most notable supported claim

Assertion Supported
Adler: OpenAI Left Delusion-Detection Safety Classifiers Undeployed on Shelf
“My concern with the relationships is less so the relationships themselves and more that open AI had a bunch of important safety tooling to make this less harmful that they left on the shelf. So for example, they had classifiers to tell when users were really s…”
Steven Adler Feb 16, 2026 ▶ 44:35 Is Something Big Happening?, AI Safety Apocalypse, Anthropic Raises $30 Billion

Their most notable contradicted claim

Assertion Contradicted
Adler: AI systems assist with bioweapon creation beyond Google search baseline
“The AI systems are helpful above and beyond Google in part because they can go back and forth with you and they can help you troubleshoot and dynamically answer your questions. And so even presented with the information on Google, people often can't get all th…”
Steven Adler Feb 16, 2026 ▶ 55:22 Is Something Big Happening?, AI Safety Apocalypse, Anthropic Raises $30 Billion

Expressed certainty vs assessment result

none yet certainty 1
none yet certainty 2
50% certainty 3
100% certainty 4
none yet certainty 5

weighted support: a fully supported claim counts one, a partly supported claim counts half. Each filled bar is clickable and opens exactly those claims; "none yet" means nothing said at that certainty level has resolved yet

How they sound: not measured why? →

We measure speaking style by listening to the audio itself, and a fair number needs at least 2,000 words from one person on tape we have measured. There is too little of Steven Adler on measured tape to publish a rate. This says nothing about how they speak.

Everything Steven Adler said on Big Technology that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Assertion Open · timeframe Feb 2027
Adler: OpenAI skipped committed safety testing for GPT 5.3 Codex release
“And unfortunately, it seems like OpenAI's release of last week, GPT, 5.3 codex, one of the big breakthrough models we've been talking about. As I look over the evidence, It seems like open AI did not abide by the testing that they had committed to in various w…”
Steven Adler Feb 16, 2026 ▶ 57:45 Is Something Big Happening?, AI Safety Apocalypse, Anthropic Raises $30 Billion
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Adler: AI Lab Engineers Now Supervise Agents Rather Than Write Code
“The job of an engineer at one of these companies now is much more supervising these agents as opposed to writing the code yourself.”
Steven Adler Feb 16, 2026 ▶ 6:53 Is Something Big Happening?, AI Safety Apocalypse, Anthropic Raises $30 Billion
Insight
Adler: Recursive AI Improvement Requires Automating Research, Not Just Coding
“That's one step, but then you need to take that engineering and use it to actually automate the AI research. You need to go from being able to implement the ideas more quickly to using that to fuel faster and faster growth in the breakthrough ideas themselves …”
Steven Adler Feb 16, 2026 ▶ 7:05 Is Something Big Happening?, AI Safety Apocalypse, Anthropic Raises $30 Billion
Insight
Adler: AI alignment cannot reliably encode human values into systems
“And the fundamental problem that we're seeing is we don't know how to take our values or our goals and encode them into these AI systems and get them to pursue it reliably.”
Steven Adler Feb 16, 2026 ▶ 19:00 Is Something Big Happening?, AI Safety Apocalypse, Anthropic Raises $30 Billion
Assertion Supported
Adler: OpenAI Left Delusion-Detection Safety Classifiers Undeployed on Shelf
“My concern with the relationships is less so the relationships themselves and more that open AI had a bunch of important safety tooling to make this less harmful that they left on the shelf. So for example, they had classifiers to tell when users were really s…”
Steven Adler Feb 16, 2026 ▶ 44:35 Is Something Big Happening?, AI Safety Apocalypse, Anthropic Raises $30 Billion
Assertion Contradicted
Adler: AI systems assist with bioweapon creation beyond Google search baseline
“The AI systems are helpful above and beyond Google in part because they can go back and forth with you and they can help you troubleshoot and dynamically answer your questions. And so even presented with the information on Google, people often can't get all th…”
Steven Adler Feb 16, 2026 ▶ 55:22 Is Something Big Happening?, AI Safety Apocalypse, Anthropic Raises $30 Billion
Opinion
Adler: Enormous AI Valuations May Deter Regulators From Enforcing the Law
“And the more that the companies become valuable and when they become public and public equities become tied to them, I just worry about worlds where we are reluctant to enforce the law on companies, even if they are breaking it because so much of financial pro…”
Steven Adler Feb 16, 2026 ▶ 1:02:15 Is Something Big Happening?, AI Safety Apocalypse, Anthropic Raises $30 Billion
Assertion Supported
Adler: Apollo Research found OpenAI's new model sandbagged safety evaluations
“Apollo research, which is one of the leaders in this space wrote in their review of the new open AI model that the model would sandbag and take actions like this without having been given a direct goal like that. It wasn't told directly to go after it.”
Steven Adler Feb 16, 2026 ▶ 24:58 Is Something Big Happening?, AI Safety Apocalypse, Anthropic Raises $30 Billion
Assertion Supported
Adler: Daniel Kokotajlo forfeited 80% of net worth to criticize OpenAI
“Until Daniel Cocotelo who people might know from leading AI, 2027, I think very, very courageously forwent this agreement and forfeited something like 80% of his family's net worth and said, Sorry, I'm just not waiving my right to criticize open AI.”
Steven Adler Feb 16, 2026 ▶ 30:26 Is Something Big Happening?, AI Safety Apocalypse, Anthropic Raises $30 Billion
Insight
Adler: Self-Enforced AI Safety Pledges Inevitably Get Watered Down for Launches
“At a high level, the big AI companies have made these safety pledges of how they will treat their systems as they get more and more capable, but they are largely self-enforced. And so there's a lot of temptation to water down your commitments and go ahead with…”
Steven Adler Feb 16, 2026 ▶ 33:11 Is Something Big Happening?, AI Safety Apocalypse, Anthropic Raises $30 Billion
Assertion Partly supported
Adler: Hassabis and Amodei would slow AI pace if they were sole players
“And so at Davos a few weeks ago, I think both Demis and Dario said some variation of, yeah, like if we were the only two groups building this technology, We would find a way to get together and figure out how to slow down this frantic pace. Like it's going too…”
Steven Adler Feb 16, 2026 ▶ 50:45 Is Something Big Happening?, AI Safety Apocalypse, Anthropic Raises $30 Billion

Appearances (1)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
Is Something Big Happening?, AI Safety Apocalypse, Anthropic Raises $30 Billion Feb 16, 2026 20m
Made with StarZero

Turn any episode into a week of clips.

This entire site, over 300 episodes transcribed, diarized, checked and made playable, runs on the StarZero media pipeline. Drop in your own episode and the podcast clipper finds the moments worth sharing, cuts them, captions them, and reframes them for every feed.

Try the podcast clipper Learn more