Expert takes Aug 20, 2026

Today · event date 08-19

Gary Marcus: almost nobody believes the safety explanation.

As far as Gary Marcus can see, almost nobody believes the safety explanation. The cognitive scientist and long-standing AI critic posted on August 19 about how the outside world was reading OpenAI's announcement the previous day that it had paused some frontier training for safety reasons (the piece, 08-19). It earns a place here because it stands on the opposite side of the judgment we published yesterday. We read that pause as disclosure escalating into a work stoppage: safety evaluations used to produce a document, and this time they produced a halted training run. Marcus reads the other face of the same event: the credibility of the posture is itself the thing in dispute. One of the judgments we track long-term already records this criticism — that lab "pauses" often function as public relations — and Marcus is the person that criticism comes from. We are discounting his piece twice: the body is largely quotations of other people's posts, and in the text we retrieved today those posts have no content. He also refers to a Wall Street Journal report on OpenAI's finances, and we did not obtain that report, so we are relaying none of its figures.