These 9 quotes span 2023 to 2026. Murati's arc is institutional, not intellectual: she left OpenAI for her own lab, but her core view that safer AI and more capable AI advance together has held across the move and through Thinking Machines Lab's launch.
1. Why Does Mira Murati Say AI Safety and Capability Go Hand in Hand?
"For capabilities and safety, they're actually not separate domains. They go hand-in-hand."Mira Murati, Dartmouth Engineering, June 2024
Murati argues that smarter AI is easier to align, not harder, because a more capable model can be told what not to do and follow the instruction. She made the point at Dartmouth's June 2024 AI Everywhere event during the same visit when she received an honorary doctorate from her engineering alma mater. The position separates Murati from researchers like Yoshua Bengio, who argue today's training methods produce models that scale unpredictably.
2. What Did Mira Murati Warn About a "Race to the Bottom on Safety"?
"I think the downside is a race to the bottom on safety. That is the downside for sure."Mira Murati, Fortune, October 2023
Murati warns that competition between AI labs creates pressure to cut safety corners, the central industry risk she has named since 2023. She gave the warning to Fortune in October 2023 as OpenAI prepared its first DevDay and developers debated how fast frontier labs were shipping. Dario Amodei's Anthropic was founded on a similar premise: stay capable enough that safety-focused labs aren't outrun by less cautious ones.
3. How Far Did Mira Murati Say AGI Was From Being Safe in 2023?
"We're far from the point of having a safe, reliable, aligned AGI system."Mira Murati, Associated Press via SecurityWeek, April 2023
Murati told the Associated Press in April 2023 that no AI system, including OpenAI's, was yet safe enough to be considered aligned with human intentions. The interview ran four months after ChatGPT's launch and one month after GPT-4, when public expectations of capability were climbing fastest. The framing that alignment is unfinished business shaped subsequent policy debates and matched Demis Hassabis on staged AGI timelines.
4. Why Did Mira Murati Leave OpenAI in 2024?
"There's never an ideal time to step away from a place one cherishes, yet this moment feels right."Mira Murati, SiliconAngle, September 2024
Murati left OpenAI in September 2024 after six and a half years leading research, product, and safety teams through ChatGPT, GPT-4, DALL-E, and Sora. She posted the resignation note on X the same day OpenAI confirmed it was restructuring into a for-profit entity, alongside two senior research executives leaving the same week. She announced her own startup five months later in February 2025.
5. What Mission Did Mira Murati Set for Thinking Machines Lab?
"Thinking Machines Lab exists to empower humanity through advancing collaborative general intelligence."Mira Murati, Maginative, July 2025
Murati framed her new company's purpose as making AI work alongside people rather than replacing them. She posted the mission statement on X on July 15, 2025, the same day the lab announced a $2 billion seed round at a $12 billion valuation, the largest seed in startup history at the time. The lab prioritises multimodal systems and open science, an approach Yann LeCun has championed at Meta against the closed-API model used by OpenAI and Anthropic.
6. When Did Mira Murati First Call for AI Regulation?
"It's not too early. It's very important for everyone to start getting involved, given the impact these technologies are going to have."Mira Murati, TIME, February 2023
Murati called for AI regulation in February 2023, weeks after ChatGPT's launch and before most lawmakers had heard of OpenAI. The TIME interview, the first major profile of Murati after ChatGPT went public, framed her as the engineer making the case for outside oversight rather than self-regulation. The early position prefigured the EU AI Act, finalised in 2024, and the US Senate Judiciary hearings on AI later that summer.
7. How Did Mira Murati Respond to Elon Musk's Apple-OpenAI Criticism?
"That's his opinion. Obviously I don't think so."Mira Murati, Fortune Most Powerful Women dinner via AOL, June 2024
Murati dismissed Elon Musk's claim that the OpenAI-Apple partnership amounted to "creepy spyware" with a brief two-sentence response at Fortune's Most Powerful Women dinner in San Francisco. She used the same appearance to outline the privacy posture: Apple users' queries would not train OpenAI's models, and OpenAI would not see user data. The exchange came two weeks after Apple announced its iOS integration with ChatGPT at WWDC 2024.
8. Why Is Mira Murati Still Optimistic About AGI Progress?
"I’m quite optimistic that the progress will continue."Mira Murati, WIRED, December 2024
Murati said in December 2024 that momentum toward more capable AI still looked real, even after she had left OpenAI. Speaking at WIRED's The Big Interview event in San Francisco, she argued there was still more evidence of continued progress than of a clear ceiling. The remark places Murati closer to Demis Hassabis than to researchers who think current AI progress is nearing a limit.
9. Why Did Mira Murati Sign a Gigawatt Compute Deal With Nvidia in 2026?
"This partnership accelerates our capacity to build AI that people can shape and make their own, as it shapes human potential in turn."Mira Murati, Axios, March 2026
Murati positioned the March 2026 Nvidia partnership as expanding what humans can do with AI, not what AI does to them. The deal commits Thinking Machines Lab to a gigawatt of Nvidia's Vera Rubin compute starting in 2027, alongside an undisclosed Nvidia investment in the startup. The framing matches Murati's longstanding view that capability and human agency move together, the same idea she pressed at Dartmouth in 2024.
What to Read Next
- Dario Amodei quotes on AI safety: compare Anthropic's safety-first corporate model with Murati's nonprofit-then-startup arc
- Yoshua Bengio's AI safety warnings: read his case that current training produces unpredictable systems against Murati's view that capability and safety align
- Yann LeCun quotes on LLM limits: LeCun's open-source advocacy compared with Murati's Thinking Machines approach
- Demis Hassabis on AGI and scientific discovery: DeepMind's AGI timeline next to Murati's "far from aligned" assessment
- All AI quotes: the full Aiifi collection of AI leader perspectives
