Researchers from OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and Google issue joint AI safety warning - here's why

Over the last year, chain of thought (CoT) -- an AI model's ability to articulate its approach to a query in natural language -- has become an impressive development in generative AI, especially in agentic systems. Now, several researchers agree it may also be critical to AI safety efforts.

On Tuesday, researchers from competing companies including OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and Google DeepMind, as well as institutions like the Center for AI Safety, Apollo Research, and the UK AI Security Institute, came together in a new position paper titled "Chain of Thought Monitorability: A New and Fragile Opportunity for AI." The paper details how observing CoT could reveal key insights about a model's ability to misbehave -- and warns that training models to become more advanced could cut off those insights.

(Disclosure: Ziff Davis, ZDNET's parent company, filed an April 2025 lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed ...