Do AI companies care about safety as much as they claim to? Their staff allocation data suggests not

Artificial intelligence presents a transformative moment for society, but it appears that the number of people focused on making sure it’s safe might fit on a single transatlantic flight.Perhaps that shouldn’t surprise given the global arms race that has propelled generative AI companies to stratospheric valuations, but it should cause some alarm. The technology makes errors, is largely untested in the wild and has shown toxic side effects on mental health.

Yet a rough estimate of how these companies are staffed suggests a disturbing imbalance, with investment into safety-oriented roles looking like a rounding error compared with the money going into making their systems more powerful. There are 373 people identified as working full time on making artificial intelligence systems safe and trustworthy at OpenAI,Google DeepMind, Anthropic and Elon Musk’s xAI, a fraction of the more than 11,000 employees estimated to work for these four major AI labs.

The estimates comes from Glass.ai, a London-based business intelligence firm. When the labs declined to provide stats on their personnel, I asked Glass.ai to investigate—which it did by crawling LinkedIn profiles, company websites, news articles and other online sources to identify staff doing safety-related work.

That includes tasks like making sure AI tools are aligned with human values, ensuring they’re secure and that they won’t send users spiralling into psychosis. To give tech companies the benefit of the doubt, Glass.ai cast a wide net for anyone who might work on making AI safe for human use, including people with generic-sounding titles like “member of technical staff,” bug bounty participants and safety “fellows” on temporary contracts.