When OpenAI employees hit a roadblock, they email this address to ask CEO Sam Altman to solve it immediately

At OpenAI, there’s a direct line for when the machine slows down: friction@openai.com. Employees use it to flag internal bottlenecks, and the label itself — “friction” — can carry enough weight to override whatever a team was already doing. If leadership thinks the issue matters, Sam Altman or Greg Brockman can step in and push it through.

The complaints are not limited to technical disasters. People have used the address for systems that aren’t working, processes that aren’t doing what they were supposed to do, and even office annoyances like not having enough IT vending machines. OpenAI’s leadership triages the inbox and decides which problems get action. One example: a pilot to reserve parking spots for employees with long commutes. Another: fixing a way to grant API credits reliably and at scale.

The system got more structure after Fidji Simo joined OpenAI as CEO of Applications in the fall of 2025. She spent three months on a listening tour and heard the same concern over and over: the company needed to keep moving fast as it grew. Simo said bureaucracy rarely appears all at once. It creeps in through small frictions — one extra meeting, one more approval, one minor annoyance at a time. She put Irina Kofman, OpenAI’s VP of strategic initiatives and operations, in charge of monitoring the inbox and making sure selected issues were resolved.

Simo also started a monthly company-wide Slack update so employees could see the progress. That part remains, even though Simo left OpenAI in early July to focus on her health and her healthcare startup. The broader point still seems to hold: at a company expected to pass 8,000 employees by the end of this year, with offices across the U.S. and around the world, leadership wants a way to hear the complaints before they harden into bigger problems.

Not everyone loves it. One former team leader said they got “dozens” of friction emails over several years and found them disruptive, especially when their team was already underwater and under-resourced. In a place where long hours are normal and even “code red” is part of the vocabulary, OpenAI has basically formalized the office fire drill. That may be efficient. It’s also a neat reminder that speed in tech often means making everyone else stop what they’re doing right now.