Daniel Kokotajlo

US-based AI researcher and whistleblower; Executive Director of the AI Futures Project, a Berkeley, California 501(c)(3) nonprofit he founded in 2025 following his departure from OpenAI. He holds a BA in Philosophy from the University of Notre Dame (2014) and an MA in Philosophy from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2017), with prior roles at AI Impacts and the Centre on Long-Term Risk before joining OpenAI in 2022.

A researcher in OpenAI's governance division from 2022 until April 2024, he publicly announced his resignation, citing loss of confidence that the company would behave responsibly in its approach to artificial general intelligence. He declined to sign the non-disparagement clause accompanying his separation, placing approximately $2 million in vested equity at risk; he retained that equity after OpenAI was subsequently forced by public reporting to rescind such clauses company-wide.

On 4 June 2024 he was one of seven named signatories of "A Right to Warn about Advanced Artificial Intelligence" — co-signed with Jacob Hilton, Ramana Kumar, Neel Nanda, William Saunders, Carroll Wainwright, and Daniel Ziegler, and endorsed by Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, and Stuart Russell. The letter is the primary insider-mobilisation event documented in the event entry for the letter and in the insider whistleblowing from frontier labs strategy entry.