Flight 1583 departed Stockholm Arlanda Airport on February 7 and was supposed to land in Málaga, Spain, four hours later.
However, almost two hours into the journey, the Airbus A320neo U-turned while flying over Belgium, according to flight-tracking data.
It flew back to Sweden, touching down in the capital 3 hours and 20 minutes after taking off.
In a statement to Business Insider, an airline spokesperson said the plane turned around "after a suspected rodent sighting on board."
"We followed established procedures and, as a precaution, returned the aircraft to Arlanda to carry out standard inspections of both the aircraft and relevant suppliers," they added. "Passengers were boarded on a new aircraft to Malaga shortly after."
SAS did not confirm exactly what kind of rodent was spotted, but Flightradar24 reported that it was a mouse.
Diverting a plane due to a rodent might seem bizarre, but loose animals on board can pose a safety risk. It could potentially damage electrical wiring or other components, leading to system faults or, in rare cases, a fire.
Data from Flightradar24 shows an extra flight, operated under the call sign SAS95T, flew from Stockholm to Málaga later the same day.
It arrived around 3:30 p.m., five hours later than passengers were first scheduled to arrive in the Costa del Sol.
This wasn't the first time that such an unwelcome passenger has caused a flight to turn around.
In 2024, One Mile at a Time reported that an SAS flight to Malága returned to Copenhagen after a mouse was found in somebody's in-flight meal, before it escaped into the cabin.
Later that year, a TAP Air Portugal plane was grounded after 132 hamsters escaped from their cages inside the cargo hold.
Corporate resignations rarely make news, except at the highest levels. But in the last two years, a spate of X posts, Substack open letters, and public statements from prominent artificial intelligence researchers have created a new literary form — the AI resignation letter — with each addition becoming an event to be mined for meaning. Together, the canon of these letters — some of them apparently bound by non-disclosure agreements and other loyalties, legally compelled or not — tells us a lot about how some of the top people in AI see themselves and the trajectory of their industry. Overall, the image is bleak.
This past week brought several additions to the annals of "Why I quit this incredibly valuable company working on bleeding-edge tech" letters, including from researchers at xAI and an op-ed in The New York Times from a departing OpenAI researcher. Perhaps the most unusual was by Mrinank Sharma, who was put in charge of Anthropic's Safeguards Research Team a year ago, and who announced his departure from what is often considered the more safety-minded of the leading AI startups. He posted a 778-word letter on X that was at times romantic and brooding — he quoted the poets Rainer Maria Rilke and Mary Oliver. Opining on AI safety, his own experiences working on AI sycophancy and "AI-assisted bioterrorism," and the "poly-crisis" consuming our society, the letter had three footnotes and some ominous, if vague, warnings.
"We appear to be approaching a threshold where our wisdom must grow in equal measure to our capacity to affect the world, lest we face the consequences," Sharma wrote. "Throughout my time here, I've repeatedly seen how hard it is to truly let our values govern our actions."
Sharma noted that his final project at Anthropic was "on understanding how Al assistants could make us less human or distort our humanity" — a nod, perhaps, to the scourge of AI psychosis and other novel harms emerging from people overvaluing their relationships with chatbots. He said that he didn't know what he was going to do next, but expressed a desire to pursue "a poetry degree and devote myself to the practice of courageous speech." The researcher ended by including the full text of "The Way It Is" by the poet William Stafford.
In the annals of AI resignations, Sharma's missive might be less dramatic than the boardroom coup that ousted OpenAI CEO Sam Altman for five days in November 2023. It's less troubling than some of the other end-of-days warnings published by AI safety researchers who quit their posts believing that their employers weren't doing enough to mitigate the potential harms of artificial general intelligence, or AGI, a smarter-than-human intelligence that AI companies are racing to build. (Some AI experts question whether AGI is even achievable or what it might mean.)
But Sharma's note captures the deep attachments that top AI researchers — who are extremely well-compensated and work together in small teams — feel to their work, their colleagues, and, often, their employers. It also exposes some of the tensions that we see cropping up again and again in these resignation announcements. At top AI labs, there's an intense competition for resources between research/safety teams and people working on consumer-facing AI products. (Few, if any, public resignations seem to come from people on the product side.) There are pressures to ship without proper testing, established safeguards, or knowing what might happen when a system goes rogue. And there's a deep sense of mission and purpose that can sometimes be upended by feelings of betrayal.
Many of the people who have publicly quit AI companies work in safety and "alignment," the field tasked with making sure that AI capabilities align with human needs and welfare. Many of them seem very optimistic about AI, and even AGI, but they worry that financial pressures are eating away at safeguards. Few seem to be giving up on the field entirely — except perhaps Sharma, the aspiring poet. Either they jump ship for another seven-, eight-, or nine-figure job at a competing AI startup, or they become civic-minded AI analysts and researchers at one of a growing number of AI think tanks.
Sam Altman
Shelby Tauber/Reuters
All of them seem to be worried that either epic gains or epic disasters lie ahead. Announcing his departure from Anthropic to become OpenAI's Head of Preparedness earlier this month, Dylan Scandinaro wrote on LinkedIn, "AI is advancing rapidly. The potential benefits are great — and so are the risks of extreme and even irrecoverable harm." Daniel Kokotajlo, who resigned from OpenAI, said that OpenAI's systems "could be the best thing that has ever happened to humanity, but it could also be the worst if we don't proceed with care."
Recently, xAI, where co-founder Elon Musk is notorious for tinkering with the proverbial dials of the Grok chatbot, has seen a half-dozen members of its founding team leave. But the locus of the AI resignation letter, as a kind of industry artifact, is the red-hot startup OpenAI, where major figures, including top executives and safety-minded researchers, have been leaving for the last two years. Some resigned; some were fired; some were described in the press as "forced out" over internal company disputes. Seven left in a short period in the first half of 2024.
With revenue paling compared to its massive and growing infrastructure costs, OpenAI recently announced that it would begin incorporating ads into ChatGPT. That caused researcher Zoë Hitzig to quit. This week, she published a resignation letter in the Times, warning about the potential implications of ads becoming part of the substrate of chatbot conversations. "ChatGPT users have generated an archive of human candor that has no precedent, in part because people believed they were talking to something that had no ulterior agenda," she wrote. But, she warned, OpenAI seemed prepared to leverage that "archive of human candor" — much as Facebook had done — to target ads and undermine user autonomy. In the service of maximizing engagement, consumers might be manipulated — the classic sin of the modern internet.
If you think you are building a world-changing invention, you need to be able to trust your leadership. That's been a problem at OpenAI. On November 17, 2023, Altman was dramatically fired by the company's board because, it claimed, Altman was "not consistently candid in his communications with the board." Less than a week later, he performed his own boardroom coup and was reinstated, before consolidating his power. The exodus proceeded from there.
On May 14, 2024, OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever announced his resignation. Sutskever was replaced as head of OpenAI's superalignment team by John Schulman, another company co-founder. A few months later, Schulman left OpenAI for Anthropic. Six months later, he announced his move to Thinking Machines Lab, an AI startup founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, who had replaced Altman as OpenAI's interim CEO during his brief firing.
The day after Sutskever left OpenAI, Jan Leike, who also helped head OpenAI's alignment work, announced on X that he had resigned. "OpenAI is shouldering an enormous responsibility on behalf of all of humanity," Leike wrote, but the company's "safety culture and processes have taken a backseat to shiny products." He thought that "OpenAI must become a safety-first AGI company." Less than two weeks later, Leike was hired by Anthropic. OpenAI and Antrhopic did not respond to requests for comment.
At OpenAI, departing researchers have said that the experts concerned with alignment and safety have often been sidelined, pushed out, or scattered among other teams, leaving researchers with the sense that AI companies are sprinting to build an invention they won't be able to control. "In short, neither OpenAI nor any other frontier lab is ready, and the world is also not ready" for AGI, wrote Miles Brundage when he resigned from OpenAI's AGI readiness team in 2024. Yet he added that "working at OpenAI is one of the most impactful things that most people could hope to do" and did not directly criticize the company. Brundage now runs AVERI, an AI research institute.
Across the AI industry, the story is much the same. In public pronouncements, top researchers gently chastise or occasionally denounce their employers for pursuing a potentially apocalyptic invention while also emphasizing the necessity of doing that research. Sometimes they offer a "cryptic warning" that leaves AI watchers scratching their heads. A few do seem genuinely alarmed at what's happening. When OpenAI safety researcher Steven Adler left the company in January 2025, he wrote that he was "pretty terrified by the pace of AI development" and wondered if it would wipe out humanity.
Yet in the many AI resignation letters, there's little discussion of how AI is being used right now. Data center construction, resource consumption, mass surveillance, ICE deportations, weapons development, automation, labor disruption, the proliferation of slop, a crisis in education — these are the areas where many people see AI affecting their lives, sometimes for the worse, and the industry's pious resignees don't have much to say about it all. Their warnings about some disaster just beyond the horizon become fodder for the tech press — and de facto cover letters for their next industry job — while failing to reach the broader public.
"Tragedies happen; people get hurt or die; and you suffer and get old," wrote William Stafford in the poem that Mrinank Sharma shared. It's a terrible thing, especially the tones of passivity and inevitability — resignation, you might call it. It can feel as if no single act of protest is enough, or, as Stafford writes in the next line: "Nothing you do can stop time's unfolding."
Jacob Silvermanis a contributing writer for Business Insider. He is the author, most recently, of "Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley."
Alyson Isaacs joined Meta with about $200 in savings after running a startup.
She shared how she prepared to return to entrepreneurship while working in Big Tech.
Isaacs resigned from Meta last year — and shared advice for others weighing a career change.
When Alyson Isaacs joined Meta in 2022, she only had about $200 in her savings account. A six-figure salary offered a chance to rebuild her finances, but her ultimate goal lay outside Big Tech.
After college, Isaacs "completely drained" her savings on a startup she'd co-founded, and found herself grappling with her next career move. After weighing her options, she decided to follow the advice of a mentor: go to "startup rehab" — in other words, take a full-time job.
"You can always get a job at a Big Tech company,'" said Isaacs, who's 28 and lives in San Francisco.
About four months later, she landed a product manager role at Meta in the company's Quest for Business virtual reality division. But her entrepreneurial itch never left, and she eventually began mapping out the best path back into the startup world.
"There are ways you can be entrepreneurial," she said of working at Big Tech, "but it's very much not the same."
Over the past year, I've interviewed more than a dozen workers who, like Isaacs, chose to quit their jobs at major employers — in some cases without another role lined up. While some eventually landed at another large company, others stepped away from the corporate world entirely — joining a smaller business, launching their own venture, pursuing a career pivot, or focusing on personal priorities like parenting.
They've become outliers in an economy where workers are quitting at one of the lowest rates in the past decade — a trend driven by a hiring slowdown that's left some clinging to their jobs with few appealing alternatives. Those who have called it quits told me they did so for a mix of reasons: concerns about job security, shifts in workplace culture, entrepreneurial ambitions, or a desire for more meaningful work. In short, they wanted greater long-term agency over their careers.
Isaacs shared how she decided to take the leap back into entrepreneurship — and offered advice for others facing a similar career crossroads.
Preparing for a return to entrepreneurship
After leaving her post-college startup, Isaacs took a month to reset. She then spent two months interviewing at smaller companies to fine-tune her résumé and sharpen her interview skills. Eventually, she applied for a role at Meta and landed the job. She moved from the Berkeley area to San Francisco and started in May 2022 — about a year after graduation.
While Isaacs didn't have firm plans to return to entrepreneurship, she knew that if she ever went down that path again, she'd need to be financially prepared for life without a steady paycheck. So she started living well below her means, including living in a less expensive area, going to a basic gym, cooking at home, and avoiding shopping sprees.
"I saved so hard because I knew that this wasn't going to be the end game for me, and I wanted to start my own thing again eventually," she said.
Isaacs also prepared for a potential return to entrepreneurship by spending about five hours a week angel investing, which involved scouting and backing startups. After about a year of saving, she began making a few investments, each under $10,000. She said the experience helped her build a network in San Francisco's startup scene and spot gaps other entrepreneurs could exploit — insights that helped shape her own business ideas.
The final phase of Isaacs' preparation was soaking up everything she could from her time at Meta, including transitioning to a product manager position at Instagram — one of Meta's subsidiaries — in 2024. She said the roles gave her knowledge and experience that entrepreneurship alone couldn't provide.
"Traditional entrepreneurship was just flying by the edge of my seat and seeing what worked," she said. "But I needed that level of expertise to go farther in my career."
The question was when to make the leap and leave Meta. Isaacs said the death of her father in 2024 weighed heavily on her thought process.
"That really triggered this thought in my brain of, 'Is being a product manager at a Big Tech company what I want to do for the rest of my life?'" she said. "And the answer was resoundingly no — I wanted to do something on my own and prove myself."
By mid-2025, Isaacs found herself thinking more and more about a startup idea in the consumer AI space — and struggling to focus on her job at Meta. On July 1, she resigned; the next day, she began working full-time on her startup, which she described as an "agentic AI solution for personal wellness." The company is currently in stealth, meaning the team isn't publicly sharing full details while the product is still in development. She said she and her two co-founders are testing the product with users and plan to open a pre-seed funding round in the spring.
Advice for others weighing big career moves
Isaacs said she knows many people might hesitate to give up a Big Tech job. But she believes some underestimate their chances of finding a new role or building something themselves — and end up stuck in jobs they don't enjoy.
"It's kind of like dating," she said, adding that if you anticipate a bad dating pool, "you're going to stay with your bad ex."
Isaacs said she wasn't worried about resigning from Meta, in part because she's a "super optimist" about her career. If her startup doesn't work out, she's confident in her backup plan — the same one she relied on after her post-college startup opportunity fell through.
"Leaving Meta wasn't scary for me because I was like, 'I can always get another job in Big Tech,'" she said.
Isaacs has a few pieces of advice for other aspiring entrepreneurs. She recommends connecting with as many people as possible who are relevant to the venture you want to pursue — and looking for ways to help them, whether through angel investing, advising, or offering support.
"You kind of create this flywheel of people helping you if you help other people first," she said.
Additionally, even if your end goal is to build a business, Isaacs said having experience at a big-name company can give you valuable credibility as an entrepreneur.
"I needed to be undeniable as a founder, and having a big-box name brand on your résumé gives you that undeniability," she said.
AI researcher Gary Marcus said that if someone is not creatively inclined, they may find AI quite fun.
Gary Marcus
Gary Marcus said AI fatigue is not likely to hit everyone the same way.
Marcus said some workers may find AI enjoyable for creative uses.
As for software engineers, Marcus said he gets why programmers are starting to burn out.
AI fatigue won't hit everyone the same way, AI researcher Gary Marcus said.
"In some domains, AI might actually make a person's job more fun," Marcus told Business Insider.
Software engineers are increasingly discussing how AI is draining them. Siddhant Khare, who builds AI tools, recently wrote about how he's experiencing AI fatigue.
"If someone who builds agent infrastructure full-time can burn out on AI, it can happen to anyone," Khare wrote.
Marcus said that not all industries are set to be disrupted in the same way AI has upended programming and engineering.
"If somebody needs to do some artistic work and they don't really have artistic talent, it might be fun to get the system to make them feel like they have a superpower," he said.
However, Marcus said he isn't surprised that programmers are beginning to feel fatigued.
"Some people in coding, in particular, probably feel like constant pressure, and now they feel like what they're doing is debugging somebody else's code, instead of writing code," he said. "Debugging somebody else's code is not particularly fun."
The feeling Marcus described echoed what Khare told Business Insider when asked to expand on his AI fatigue.
"We used to call it an engineer, now it is like a reviewer," Khare said. "Every time it feels like you are a judge at an assembly line and that assembly line is never-ending."
Steve Yegge, a veteran engineer, said companies should limit employees' time spent on AI-assisted work to 3 hours. He said AI has "a vampiric effect."
"I seriously think founders and company leaders and engineering leaders at all levels, all the way down to line managers, have to be aware of this and realize that you might only get three productive hours out of a person who's vibe coding at max speed," Yegge told The "Pragmatic Engineer" newsletter/podcast. "So, do you let them work for three hours a day? The answer is yes, or your company's going to break."
Susan Cannon is struggling to pay off her credit card debt due to the high interest rates.
Desiree Rios for BI
Sitting outside every morning with a fresh cup of coffee or reading a book in the front yard at night: it's the simple pleasures that matter to Susan Cannon.
"I can't get the balance down because I am still having to use credit cards at the end of the month to get groceries and gas," Cannon, who lives in a mobile home in rural Texas, told Business Insider. "I pay my bills, but because of the interest rates, it keeps going up. I feel like I'm being gouged."
Cannon has $39,440 in credit-card debt spread across 19 cards with varying interest rates, from 12.15% to 34.99%. The issue began to spiral when the pandemic hit — she lost her part-time job as a mystery shopper, which she had held since retiring from her full-time job as a medical coder in 2015.
Since then, she has relied on minimal COVID relief funds, her Social Security, and her pension. Credit cards have helped her stay afloat, using them for gas, groceries, and home repairs. While she paid at least $25 more than the minimum monthly payment, the interest rates prevented her from making a dent in her balance.
The only way she believes she can pay off her balance is through lower interest rates. Capping rates is supported by both Democratic and Republican lawmakers, and even President Donald Trump — he recently proposed a 10% cap on credit card interest rates, a proposal pushed by lawmakers like Sen. Bernie Sanders.
Companies and leaders in the financial world have said that capping rates would ultimately have a negative impact on consumers because banks may limit their offerings, driving more people to riskier sources of credit.
Credit card debt in the US is at a record high. Inflation and high living costs are pushing consumers to turn to credit cards to stay afloat in the short term, while high interest rates drag them down in the long term.
Economic conditions play a significant role in high credit-card balances, Adam Rust, the director of financial services at the Consumer Federation of America, told Business Insider.
"Wages aren't growing as quickly as the cost of living. People are struggling to get by," Rust said. "They use their credit card when they're having a tough time making ends meet, and repeated across tens of millions of households, the result is a surge in credit card debt."
Cannon said that Trump's proposal to cap rates would make a huge difference for her. Since her divorce in the 80s, she has worked multiple jobs at once, including working for Coca-Cola during the day while cleaning office buildings at night. She later worked in accounting full-time and, on weekends, handed out samples at grocery stores until her retirement. She now works part-time as a mystery shopper, earning about $400 to $500 a week, and has cut back her hours to preserve her health. Even if she looked for more work, it wouldn't be easy; US employers are hiring at one of the lowest rates since 2013.
Cannon said a cap on credit card interest rates would make a significant difference for her.
Desiree Rios for BI
She's spent her life working to pay her bills, but she couldn't prepare for the pandemic and the financial and emotional toll it would take, and she doesn't see an end in sight unless interest rates go down.
"Am I going to keep working like this, or am I going to be able to sit down and at least just sit outside and read a book in the evening?" Cannon added, saying that she lives minimally, doesn't buy new clothes, has no TV subscriptions, and keeps just a prepaid phone, "but I don't know what more I can do."
'It's all going toward interest'
Cannon started signing up for credit cards about 15 years ago, believing that paying off more cards would boost her credit score. Her strategy worked for a while — she said that she would apply for a credit card, pay off the balance, set it aside, and her score would go up.
While the cards with the highest interest rates were store credit cards that offer discounts on certain purchases, Cannon said she made sure to use them sparingly. She did not anticipate losing a third of her income once the pandemic hit. Credit cards turned from a way to boost her credit score to a means of survival.
"With this cold, my electric bill last month was $200, and I'm expecting to get hit with about a $300 bill, I believe, for next month," Cannon said, adding that maintaining her home and land has added to her debt.
Still, many people use credit cards for reasons beyond making ends meet. For example, travel rewards can motivate people to purchase vacations and other travel expenses on their cards. A 2024 Bankrate survey said that respondents reported high credit card usage for medical costs, too much discretionary spending, and home renovations. A 2025 AARP report found that credit card debt is the most common type of debt among Americans aged 50 and older, with cardholders using them for everyday expenses and housing costs.
"I've always tried to put some in savings, but it's gotten to where it's all going toward interest," Cannon said. "I just cannot get ahead."
She's tried to contact some of her banks to lower her interest rates, to no avail. Cannon most recently received a denial letter in the mail from CitiBank — where she has a 28.49% interest rate — which said its decision "was based, in whole or in part," on information from her credit reporting agency.
"Based on your credit score, your current APR is equal to or lower than the APR we offer consumers with the same credit score who apply for the same or a similar credit card product today," the letter said.
Interest rates on credit cards have steadily climbed over the past decade. The average rate stands at nearly 23% annually, according to the New York Federal Reserve, up from about 12% a decade prior. Rust said that credit card companies, and especially those that manage store cards with the highest interest rates, are "incredible profit machines" that are savvy at pulling consumers in for specific products.
"Those cards benefit from having a consumer who's captive to using that card in that store to get that deal," Rust said. "And so perhaps it's not surprising that interest rates are frequently higher as a result."
The motivation for companies to charge high interest rates could go beyond profit, an analysis from the New York Federal Reserve said. The rates could offset losses when a customer defaults, the analysis said, along with operating expenses, such as marketing costs, that might be built into the interest rate.
"You might say, 'Why don't they just give them a lower rate, and then they won't need the marketing because people will come for the lower rate?' But people don't come for the lower rate. They respond to the marketing," Itamar Drechsler, one of the authors on the analysis, told Business Insider.
For example, consumers might be pulled in by a limited-time low APR or certain rewards or points, without considering that the promotion is temporary and whether they can afford a higher rate down the road.
Cannon has always made sure to pay at least the minimum monthly payment on her credit cards to keep the balance from spiraling.
Desiree Rios for BI
Cannon ensures she makes at least the minimum monthly payment on all her cards so she doesn't fall too far behind. She uses her Social Security check to cover about half of her bills, and at the end of each month, she finds herself transferring some money from her savings account into her checking account to cover the remainder of her expenses — leaving her with just enough to pay slightly more than those minimum credit card payments, but nothing extra.
"I have tried to keep up with these credit cards, and I still am," Cannon said. "I feel like a fool, but at the same time, I wouldn't be in this situation if they hadn't raised those interest rates."
Tackling the credit card problem
Credit card interest rates are a rare issue that has garnered bipartisan agreement. The 2009 CARD Act required companies to notify customers of interest rate increases at least 45 days in advance and placed restrictions on actions such as late fees and withdrawal fees. However, the legislation didn't cap interest rates or rate increases.
That's why there's been a renewed push to cap interest rates. Trump called for a one-year, 10% cap on rates in early January, saying in a Truth Social post that he would "no longer let the American Public be 'ripped off' by Credit Card Companies that are charging Interest Rates of 20 to 30%, and even more."
More recently, over 55 organizations, including the Consumer Federation of America and the NAACP, called on House and Senate lawmakers to pass bipartisan legislation that would cap credit card interest rates at 10% for 5 years. Research from Vanderbilt University found that the proposal could save $100 billion a year.
Credit card companies have pushed back on the proposed caps. A coalition of banking groups said in a joint statement in response to Trump's proposal that a 10% cap "would reduce credit availability and be devastating for millions of American families and small business owners who rely on and value their credit cards, the very consumers this proposal intends to help. If enacted, this cap would only drive consumers toward less regulated, more costly alternatives."
Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan's CEO, said on a recent earnings call that capping credit card rates could limit access to credit for customers with lower credit scores.
Those more costly alternatives include payday loans, which tend to charge high interest rates and fees that can be a lot more difficult for consumers to escape than credit cards, Rust said. SoFi's CEO, Anthony Noto, said his company is prepared to extend personal loans to consumers, should a credit-card cap be implemented.
"Relying on credit cards is expensive, but it's important not to forget that they still come with protections," Rust said. "They still cost less than a payday lender. It's still easier to resolve a problem with your credit card company than with a buy now, pay later company."
Cannon makes up just a sliver of the $1.28 trillion in credit card debt in the US, and she said that she recognizes that other people have it worse than her. It doesn't make her situation less painful. She physically cannot work multiple jobs, and if she put all of her money toward her credit cards, she wouldn't be able to maintain her property and afford her basic needs.
"I never thought I would be in this position," Cannon said. "I'm just surviving."
