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Scientists from OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Anthropic and Meta have abandoned their fierce corporate rivalry to issue a joint warning about artificial intelligence safety. More than 40 researchers across these competing companies published a research paper today arguing that a brief window to monitor AI reasoning could close forever — and soon.
The unusual cooperation comes as AI systems develop new abilities to “think out loud” in human language before answering questions. This creates an opportunity to peek inside their decision-making processes and catch harmful intentions before they turn into actions. But the researchers warn this transparency is fragile and could vanish as AI technology advances.
The paper has drawn endorsements from some of the field’s most prominent figures, including Nobel Prize laureate Geoffrey Hinton, often called “godfather of AI,” of the University of Toronto; Ilya Sutskever, co-founder of OpenAI who now leads Safe Superintelligence Inc.; Samuel Bowman from Anthropic; and John Schulman from Thinking Machines.
Modern reasoning models think in plain English.Monitoring their thoughts could be a powerful, yet fragile, tool for overseeing future AI systems.I and researchers across many organizations think we should work to evaluate, preserve, and even improve CoT monitorability. pic.twitter.com/MZAehi2gkn— Bowen Baker (@bobabowen) July 15, 2025
“AI systems that ‘think’ in human language offer a unique opportunity for AI safety: we can monitor their chains of thought for the intent to misbehave,” the researchers explain. But they emphasize that this monitoring capability “may be fragile” and could disappear through various technological developments.
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Models now show their work before delivering final answers
The breakthrough centers on recent advances in AI reasoning models like OpenAI’s o1 system. These models work through complex problems by generating internal chains of thought — step-by-step reasoning that humans can read and understand. Unlike earlier AI systems trained primarily on human-written text, these models create internal reasoning that may reveal their true intentions, inc …