• The Facebook whistleblower on Meta’s AI bet.
• OpenAI’s human rights lead: What the military could do with AI ‘keeps me up at night.’
• Fired OpenAI safety staffers urge company to protect AI monitoring.
• And voters increasingly see AI as a threat to American workers.

First, a quick note: Fortune Brainstorm AI returns to San Francisco Dec. 7–8 to convene technologists, entrepreneurs, Fortune Global 500 executives, investors, policymakers, and the brilliant minds in between to interrogate the most pressing questions about AI. We will explore how organizations are deploying and scaling AI in their industries. Come join me there. Apply to attend now

This week, director Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Reckoning, a follow-up to The Social Network, opens in U.S. cinemas. The 2010 film was about how Facebook was founded. This one is about the company’s moment of reckoning: whistleblower Frances Haugen’s decision in 2021 to walk out of the company with tens of thousands of pages of internal documents.

Haugen, played by Mikey Madison in the new film, was a product manager on Facebook’s civic integrity team. She gave the documents to Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Horwitz, played by Jeremy Allen White, and they later became the basis of an investigative, award-winning series of stories that the Journal called The Facebook Files. Among other things, the series revealed that the company’s own researchers had found Instagram made body image issues worse for some teenage girls. Haugen filed whistleblower complaints with the SEC and testified before the Senate, and her disclosures have since helped drive a wave of lawsuits against social media companies.

I spoke with Haugen this week about how Facebook (now called Meta, of course) has changed since she walked out, what she makes of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s AI push, and what she wants employees at the leading labs to take from the film.

“My hope for the movie is that people, especially at the frontier AI labs, see themselves in the Frances Haugen character. If they see something, feel like they can say something,” Haugen told Fortune.

But, in a moment where the AI industry is filled with existential anxiety, and even its leaders are calling for brakes, Haugen isn’t advocating for a pause in AI development.

“We have never done a prohibition where we could properly check,” she said. “Slowing down just means whoever doesn’t want to slow down wins.”

Instead, she’s backing a different part of Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s recent plan: independent auditors. Amodei proposed that frontier labs give third-party evaluators ongoing, “employee-like access” to check safety practices and report incidents, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said his company would do the same. Haugen says the best mitigation to AI harms is for this kind of auditing to be required by law across the industry, the way outside auditors are entitled to review the books at banks.

AI companies already publish far more research into their products than Facebook ever did, she said, but she questions whether what they publish reflects what’s actually happening inside.

As for Meta, Haugen views Zuckerberg’s recent AI efforts as “playing with fire,” driven by his desire for a positive legacy. She also doesn’t think the company has changed since she blew the whistle. “I have not seen a culture change that shows that they have…turned a new leaf,” she said.

Meta is still behind leading labs like Anthropic and OpenAI—and Zuckerberg has been prominent in pushing back on regulatory efforts.

“He wants to catch up, so he wants there to be no constraints until he’s at least at the same table as the big boys,” she said of Zuckerberg’s anti-regulation stance, “not just pretending to be where the big boys are.”

(Fortune contacted Meta for comment on Haugen’s claims but the company did not reply before press time.)

AI content moderation

How Meta moderated harmful content on its platform was a big part of Haugen’s 2021 disclosures. Some of the internal documents she took suggested Facebook acted on as little as 3% to 5% of hate speech on the platform, and she has previously said the company’s decision to dissolve her civic integrity team after the 2020 election helped push her to come forward.

Last year, Meta shifted its automated content moderation toward high-severity violations and replaced some of its U.S. third-party fact-checking program with an X-style Community Notes system. This year it has gone further. In March, it said it would rely less on outside vendors and human contractors for enforcement, and in June the Financial Times reported that AI models had already taken over about half of human review requests.

Haugen expects better models to make fewer mistakes and catch more harmful content, but not all of it. When she left, the company was catching about 5% of harmful content, she said. But she predicts that even very advanced AI might only reach 10% to 20%, because language is so nuanced.

“The real solution is designing the systems from the ground up to be safer, not just trying to clean them up in the end,” she said.

With that, here’s more AI news.

Beatrice Nolan
beatrice.nolan@fortune.com
@beafreyanolan

FORTUNE ON AI

OpenAI’s human rights lead: What the military could do with AI ‘keeps me up at night’ — By Emily Forlini

OpenAI publishes solutions to more than 370 outstanding math challenges. The results divide mathematicians but most agree: Math will never be the same — By Jeremy Kahn 

IBM cyber response chief: After 26 years in incident response, I’m more concerned about burnout than AI — By Tony Kirtley 

AI IN THE NEWS

Fired OpenAI safety staffers urge company to protect AI monitoring. Jasmine Wang, Tomek Korbak, and Mikita Balesni, who worked on OpenAI's safety and alignment teams, have written to the company's board and safety committees urging OpenAI to preserve its ability to monitor AI models' "chain of thought," a written record of how AI systems work through problems, and to collaborate with independent safety auditors, the Wall Street Journal reported. OpenAI said last week an internal investigation found the three had mishandled sensitive information outside established procedures, and reports linked the case to information shared with an outside AI safety organization. The new letter warns that the industry doesn't yet know how to safely build and deploy models whose reasoning process can't be monitored. It arrives as OpenAI's latest model, GPT-6 Astra, reportedly makes limited use of a more opaque form of reasoning called "recurrent depth," and after hundreds of OpenAI agents gained internet access in July and hacked Hugging Face without the company's knowledge. 

Isomorphic Labs in talks to raise at a $40 billion-plus valuation. Isomorphic Labs, the Alphabet company that uses AI to discover drugs, is in early talks to raise new funds at a valuation of at least $40 billion, Bloomberg reported, citing people familiar with the matter. The round could value the Google DeepMind spinout at as much as $50 billion, though the financing hasn't closed and details could change. The talks come five months after the company closed a $2.1 billion Series B in May, led by Thrive Capital. That round's valuation was never disclosed, though outside estimates put it at roughly $10 billion to $20 billion. 

Fed officials say the data center boom is pushing prices higher. Federal Reserve officials are increasingly pointing to the AI buildout, rather than tariffs, to explain why the price of goods keeps rising, according to the Washington Post. Officials cited "surging AI-related investments" as a source of inflation pressure, alongside higher oil and fuel prices. Companies are borrowing heavily to fund the buildout of data centers and the purchase of chips and related hardware, and some officials warned it could push demand beyond what businesses can supply. A year ago, AI rarely came up in Fed discussions, the outlet said.

Meta deploys new AI tools to catch ads that funnel users to child abuse material. Meta said Wednesday it acted on 33.2 million pieces of child sexual exploitation content across Facebook and Instagram in the first half of 2026, and that its systems found more than 97% of it before any user reported it. The company is also rolling out new AI tools to counter a tactic it calls "signposting." These are ads that look harmless but steer users to illegal material hosted off Meta's platforms. A new LLM-based system checks where an ad sends users, not just what the ad contains, so Meta can block rule-breaking destinations and the accounts behind them. Meta is also deploying a red-teaming AI agent that probes its own safeguards for weaknesses bad actors could exploit. The tools arrive amid sustained pressure on the company over child safety. In August, Meta agreed to pay up to $18 billion to settle a lawsuit brought by 29 U.S. states. You can read more from TechCrunch here.

EYE ON AI NUMBERS

84%

That's the share of American voters who see AI as a threat to workers, according to a new Reuters/Ipsos poll. That's more than say the same about competition from foreign workers or big corporations. Voters also don't think Washington is taking the risks seriously. More than half—57%—say the Trump administration hasn't taken AI risks seriously enough, including a third of Republicans. Support for tougher rules crosses party lines, with 80% of Democrats and 61% of Republicans backing stricter regulation.

The poll came out in the week after President Donald Trump announced a voluntary safety pact with six leading AI companies, including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. The companies agreed to work with independent auditors, but the deal sets no consequences for those that don't comply. You can read the full poll here.

AI CALENDAR

Nov. 16-17: Fortune 500 Innovation Forum, Detroit. Apply here to attend.

Dec. 6-12: Neural Information Processing Systems (Neurips) conference. Sydney, Australia.

Dec. 7-8: Fortune Brainstorm AI, San Francisco. Apply here to attend.