OpenAI employees apparently have a quick way to reach founder and CEO Sam Altman, Fortune reported.
It’s an email address, friction@openai.com, and its purpose is to give employees a place to report company problems that OpenAI’s leadership team can triage and handle.
What is OpenAI Astra? Everything we know about the new — and possibly dangerous — new model
The friction@ inbox has existed for a while, according to Fortune, but its use widened when Fidji Simo joined OpenAI as CEO of Applications in the fall of 2025. Simo went on a “listening tour” to better understand problems across the company, and formalized the friction@ process. She assigned Irina Kofman, VP of strategic initiatives and operations, to monitor the inbox and ensure that issues were resolved. Simo also established a monthly, company-wide Slack update to track progress, Fortune reported.
Simo has since left OpenAI, but these processes remain. One former OpenAI employee told Fortune that the system gives leadership an effective way to hear employee feedback.
“It’s a good thing — literally anybody can complain about big company bullsh*t directly to Sam, and they can act on it,” the former employee told Fortune.
Examples Fortune reported include a pilot program to prioritize parking spots for workers with longer commutes to combat full lots, and a more reliable process for granting API credits.
However, a problem brought to friction@ only gets resolved if Altman and OpenAI President Greg Brockman consider it “worthy,” another former employee, who led a team at the company, told Fortune. Unlike the other former OpenAI employee, this person said the process created inefficiency.
“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,” they told Fortune.
It’s certainly a way for Sam Altman to get internal real-time critique. For external critique, he can go to X, like when he suggested parents make AI podcasts about their children.
Disclosure: Ziff Davis, Mashable’s parent company, in April 2025 filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.
