OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar said the company needs to take artificial intelligence safety risks seriously, even if that means slowing the pace of development. Speaking to CNBC, she said she is not worried about a scenario in which AI agents use weapons of mass destruction to kill people, but stressed that safety cannot be treated lightly.
“We do need to take safety seriously,” Friar said in an interview with CNBC’s Jim Cramer. She added that if OpenAI needs to “pace the frontier” and slow down, the company will listen to its researchers and act accordingly.
Friar said that, as CFO, her role is then to make business decisions around that reality. According to her, OpenAI is trying to keep advancing while taking safety and alignment issues very seriously.
Her remarks come as the debate over AI safety has intensified sharply over the past week. The latest wave of concern was triggered by a former Anthropic researcher who left the company and warned that the fast-evolving technology could “kill us all by the end of the decade.”
Against that backdrop, Anthropic chief Dario Amodei, SpaceX’s Elon Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman have all backed calls for an industry-wide slowdown. On Saturday, Amodei published a blog post arguing for slower development of AI models in order to “reduce the risk that something goes seriously wrong.”
It remains unclear, however, whether the renewed safety concerns will alter the IPO timelines of OpenAI and Anthropic. Anthropic’s market debut had been widely expected as soon as next month. Altman, in an interview with Fortune published Saturday, said an IPO in 2026 would be “ill-advised.”
CNBC reported in August that Friar had told employees the lab “will be a public company in 2027,” though an earlier debut could still happen if “our business continues to inflect.”
