Safety Officer Hired To Audit Lab Where She Has No Network Access

Priya Desai, 34, began work Tuesday as Chief Safety Officer at Meridian AI Research, a position established after the company's board of directors voted to implement independent auditing of the laboratory's model development process. Desai has a desk in the Palo Alto office, a company email address, and access to the building's parking garage. She does not have credentials to the compute cluster, read permissions on the model repository, or login access to the Slack channels where experiments are designed and approved. When she asked for these credentials during onboarding, she was told they would need to come from the lab director, Marcus Chen, who also sets her quarterly performance goals.

I submit my findings to people who were not in the room where the decisions happened.

I submit my findings to people who were not in the room where the decisions happened,

; Desai said in an interview conducted at a coffee shop near Meridian's offices, where she had agreed to meet because she was not certain whether discussing her role in the building was permitted. The position was advertised internally as reporting to the Chief Technology Officer, a title that does not exist on Meridian's current org chart. Desai's manager is listed as Chen, the researcher whose work she is responsible for monitoring. Chen did not respond to requests for comment.

Meridian's safety framework specifies that all significant experiments must be logged in a central registry before they begin. The registry is maintained by Chen's team and is accessible only through a password sent weekly by email to people Chen designates. Desai has not received this password. When she asked during a team standup whether the registry could be shared with her, Chen replied that access controls were still being worked out and that he would follow up offline. He has not followed up. A company spokesman said that Desai's role was designed to be flexible and responsive to the lab's needs, and that forcing her to have access to systems would undermine the relationship of trust between safety and research.

At press time, Desai was preparing a presentation to the board summarizing her first week of observations. She had scheduled time with three researchers who had agreed to walk her through their work verbally and answer questions. Two of them canceled on Monday morning, citing scheduling conflicts. The third sent her a document titled 'General Approach Overview' that contained no dates, no model specifications, and no performance metrics. Desai is planning to request it anyway in her report as a sign of institutional cooperation.