OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar emphasizes 'need to take safety seriously' on AI risks

OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar told CNBC's Jim Cramer that she is not worried about the possibility of AI agents using weapons of mass destruction to kill, but said, "We do need to take safety seriously."

"And if it means we have to pace the frontier and slow down, absolutely, we're going to listen to our researchers and do that," she said.

"As the CFO, I need to then make business decisions around it," she added. "We're pacing that frontier and taking that safety and alignment really seriously."

Tune into "Mad Money" tonight at 6 p.m. for the full interview between CNBC's Jim Cramer and OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar. Watch in real time on CNBC+ or the CNBC Pro stream.

Friar's comments come as the debate about the safety of artificial intelligence has exploded over the last week, sparked by a former Anthropic researcher who quit his job and warned that the rapidly-evolving technology could "kill us all by the end of the decade."

In the days since, concerns around the AI's ability to harm have reached a fever pitch in and out of Washington, with Anthropic chief Dario Amodei, SpaceX Elon Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman agreeing with calls for an industry-wide slowdown.

On Saturday, Amodei penned a blog post that argued for slower development of AI models to "reduce the risk that something goes seriously wrong."

But whether the renewed safety concerns affect both frontier labs' timelines toward an initial public offering is still unclear. Anthropic's debut had been widely expected to come sometime in the next month. Altman, in an interview with Fortune published Saturday, said that an IPO in 2026 would be "ill-advised."

In August, CNBC reported that Friar told employees that the lab "will be a public company in 2027," but that it could debut earlier if "our business continues to inflect."