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Kolter: AI models do not get safer automatically by scaling up

Zico Kolter · OpenAI Board Member Zico Kolter: Modern AI Is Just 200 Lines of Code · May 7, 2026 · at 15:03

Zico Kolter, Carnegie Mellon University professor, OpenAI board member, and Gray Swan co-founder, discusses whether scaling model capabilities automatically yields safety improvements.

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“You can't just sort of trust models to get safer by getting bigger. You have to put in the work to actually make them safer. And this is, I think what a lot of AI companies are investing in. This is why we in fact do have models that are improving on these dimensions too, but it's very much not that you get it for free with the rest of capability increase.”

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