Shut up and do it, Sam Altman personally intervenes if someone is blocking work in any OpenAI team

OpenAI is one of the leading AI players globally. To remain at the top, the startup needs to keep making progress. But sometimes, employees may face some challenges with getting work done, and if that does happen, they can reportedly ask OpenAI CEO Sam Altman to personally intervene with an SOS email.As per a report from Fortune, OpenAI has set up a dedicated email address in case any employee faces “friction” at work. Here, friction refers to any problems or bottlenecks that may be slowing down work. Once an employee reports something to friction@openai.com, OpenAI’s leadership team reviews the message and decides which ones should move forward.If a complaint is considered important enough, Sam Altman or OpenAI President Greg Brockman can step in to make sure things get back on track. “If Sam and Greg think something is worthy, if it’s defensible, then essentially a ‘friction’ gets started, and the party who is responsible for the block is then more or less just told to shut up and do it,” a former OpenAI employee told Fortune, “It’s no joke, a drop everything kind of deal.”Report bulls**t to directly Sam AltmanThe system is said to be effective because “literally anybody can complain about big company bulls**t directly to Sam and they can act on it,” another former employee said. “If you want to ruthlessly cut through bureaucracy, you have to be ruthless about it.” This has become increasingly more important as OpenAI’s headcount is expected to grow to more than 8,000 employees by the end of the year, with offices across the US and other parts of the world.Although the friction email address had existed for some time, the process became more structured after Fidji Simo joined OpenAI in the autumn of 2025 as chief executive of Applications. Simo began with a three-month “listening tour” to understand what was going wrong inside the company and how it could be fixed. Simo is now a part-time advisor at OpenAI. According to former OpenAI employees, this SOS email has helped in changing a lot of stuff at the startup, including a pilot programme to prioritise parking spaces for employees with longer commutes when parking lots were full, and efforts to create a more reliable and scalable way of granting API credits.System may disrupt things more than fix themBut not everyone is happy to have the top OpenAI leaders intervene in matters of friction. A former team leader at OpenAI claimed they had been on the receiving end of “dozens” of friction emails over several years and said the process was often disruptive enough to create fresh inefficiencies. “The individual who reports the issue probably thinks it’s the single most important thing, but to teams like mine that are constantly underwater, under-resourced, and over-leveraged, it’s the single most disruptive thing you could do,” the person said.The person stated that some escalations were like unwelcome fire drills inside an intense work culture where long hours, often stretching past dinner into the night, were common.OpenAI is not the only company to have such a system in place. Amazon is known to follow a similar practice under founder Jeff Bezos. At Amazon, when a customer emailed Bezos directly and he believed the issue needed attention, he would forward it to the responsible team with a single question mark. Internally, this became known as a “Jeff B escalation”, and it required immediate action.OpenAI’s system appears to follow a similar model, except that it is aimed at internal company problems rather than complaints from customers. The startup is continuing to make progress with AI models at a time when the AI race is only getting more competitive. Sam Altman has teased the company’s next AI model, Astra, already, but he says that it is too powerful to be released just yet.- EndsPublished By: Armaan AgarwalPublished On: Aug 13, 2026 10:07 IST