OpenAI employees who run into workplace roadblocks have a direct way to get their complaints in front of the company's top bosses.
The company has a dedicated email, friction@openai.com, where employees can flag what OpenAI calls “friction”, anything from internal bottlenecks to issues that are slowing pace down.
The emails are reviewed by senior leadership, which then decides whether an issue needs to be taken further. In some cases, CEO Sam Altman or OpenAI President Greg Brockman may step in themselves, according to Fortune.
A former employee said the system works because it lets staff bypass the usual layers of management and take their concerns straight to the top.
“Literally anybody can complain about big company bulls**t directly to Sam and they can act on it,” the person said. “If you want to ruthlessly cut through bureaucracy, you have to be ruthless about it.”
The process could become increasingly useful as OpenAI's workforce expands. The company is expected to have more than 8,000 employees by the end of the year, with staff based across the US and other countries.
The friction email has been around for some time, but the process reportedly became more organised after Fidji Simo joined OpenAI as chief executive of Applications in autumn 2025.
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Simo began with a three-month "listening tour" to understand internal issues before helping streamline the system. She now serves as a part-time advisor at OpenAI.
Former employees said the SOS channel has driven several changes at the company, including a pilot programme to prioritise parking spaces for staff with longer commutes, and efforts to build a more scalable system for granting API credits.
Not everyone views the arrangement positively, however.
A former team leader said they had received "dozens" of friction emails over the years and found the process often disruptive rather than helpful.
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"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, adding that some escalations felt like unwelcome fire drills within an already intense work culture.
OpenAI is not alone in following such a model, Amazon reportedly used a similar system under founder Jeff Bezos, internally known as a "Jeff B escalation."
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