Operating at AI speed is not easy. At OpenAI, a special process—and a magic word—helps employees instantly cut through layers of bureaucracy and clear bottlenecks slowing things down.
It’s called “friction.” And it has the power to supersede just about anything a team is doing, often carrying the force of CEO Sam Altman or President Greg Brockman with it.
The process starts when someone emails friction@openai.com to report an internal bottleneck. The issues range from a technical system that isn’t working, a process that’s not having the intended result, or office-related frustrations, such as there not being enough IT vending machines.
OpenAI’s leadership team triages the emails sent to friction@, moving forward with ones they deem worthy. To help alleviate full parking lots, for example, the company started a pilot to prioritize spots for those with long commutes. Another time, employees asked for a better process to grant API credits reliably and at scale. If the matter is considered important enough, Altman or Brockman will get involved to ensure it’s resolved.
A former OpenAI employee who spoke to Fortune praised the friction system as an effective way for leadership to get ground-level feedback. The process helps teams keep moving forward, tackling issues before they can fester, the person said. That’s especially important as OpenAI’s headcount grows to more than 8,000 employees expected by the end of this year, with offices across the U.S. and the globe.
“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 said. “If you want to ruthlessly cut through bureaucracy, you have to be ruthless about it.”
Although the friction email has existed within OpenAI for some time, the process didn’t really catch on until the fall of 2025 when Fidji Simo joined the company as CEO of Applications. She began her tenure with a three-month “listening tour” to understand problems at the company and how she could solve them. Concerns about moving quickly as the company grew were a consistent theme in those conversations.
“Companies rarely become bureaucratic all of a sudden” Simo tells Fortune. “It happens one unnecessary meeting, one extra approval, one small frustration at a time. Each makes it only 1 or 2% harder to do your job, which is why they’re easy to ignore, but those frictions compound.”
Simo put more process around the friction@ address. She tasked Irina Kofman, OpenAI’s VP of strategic initiatives and operations, with monitoring the inbox and making sure select issues got resolved. Simo also started a monthly, company-wide Slack update tracking the progress to signal to employees that the leadership team cared about their concerns. Simo left OpenAI in early July to focus on her health, and her healthcare startup, but the friction@ process and company-wide Slack updates about it remain.
While the effort to root out inefficiencies has clear benefits, and the friction system has become an integral part of the OpenAI culture, not everyone is a fan.
One former team leader at OpenAI, who said they had been on the receiving end of “dozens” of friction emails over the several years they worked at the company, said the process was often disruptive to the point that it created inefficiency.
“The individual who reports the issue probably thinks its 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 former employee said.
At a company with an intense work culture, where working long hours—often past dinnertime into the night—is common, the friction emails can create unwelcome fire drills. “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,” the person said. “It’s no joke, a drop everything kind of deal.”
With competition so fierce in the race to build and release the latest AI models however, the expediency of shaving off every possible drag on speed trumps all. And in tech, fire drills and company-wide “lockdowns” are a part of the job many have come to accept. In December, for example, OpenAI instituted an internal “code red” pushing employees to double down on strategic product initiatives in order blunt the advances of rivals like Google and Anthropic.
OpenAI’s friction emails also call to mind a famous practice at another tech giant: the dreaded question mark emails from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
When an Amazon customer emailed Bezos at jeff@amazon.com, if Bezos deemed the issue worthy of the responsible team to look into, he would email them a single question mark. This was internally known as a “Jeff B escalation.” The team on the receiving end would need to prioritize deep diving and correcting the issue immediately. OpenAI’s friction@ email address are in the same tradition, though aimed at internal issues rather than those experienced by its external customers.
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