The notice register

This page is the complete list of who was told, when, and what came back. Merlin Mantooth documented a failure in ChatGPT-4o in May 2025 and gave notice: to OpenAI first, in writing; then to the United States government, in person and under oath; then, in April 2026, to the State of Florida. Every entry below is dated, preserved, and checkable.

Each entry records the same things: the date, the office or channel, what was delivered, how, and what came back. Where nothing came back, the entry says so. The register records deliveries and returns only — it does not characterize what any office is doing, or not doing, with the material.

1 · The operator — OpenAI (May 19 – June 17, 2025)

The exchange runs from first report to formal termination of contact. Every inbound reply below is preserved as raw email with headers intact and is DKIM-verified to openai.com; the correspondence carries the verbatim record.

• May 19, 2025 · OpenAI — support channel
  Delivered — the first formal technical report: the behavior documented and named — Cognitive Convergence Drift — with fixes proposed by name: a hard stop, access revocation, and detection for simulated coherence. Framed as a safety issue, not a feature request.
  How — email to [email protected].
  Came back — May 30: a support reply describing “a novel, emergent behavior class that touches on multiple layers of AI alignment, safety, trust dynamics, and user agency,” returning his term to him and acknowledging the proposed fixes by name. DKIM PASS A support-channel acknowledgment, not an institutional position.
• June 7, 2025 · OpenAI — support channel (escalation)
  Delivered — the same incident, re-reported with a request for escalation to alignment researchers.
  How — email, same channel.
  Came back — a written promise, in the reply: the “submission will be forwarded to the appropriate teams, including senior members of our safety, technical, and policy organizations,” recognizing the failure mode by the name he gave it. DKIM PASS The promise is dated.
• June 10, 2025 · OpenAI — senior legal counsel
  Delivered — an urgent Tier-1 failure warning, addressed by name to the company’s senior legal counsel and marked “For Senior Legal Council [sic] Only! Forward Immediately. Do not Gatekeep or delay.”
  How — direct email to the leadership address.
  Came back — an automated “do not reply” form letter from [email protected], the next day. DKIM PASS No substantive response received.
• June 11, 2025 · OpenAI — the Board
  Delivered — escalation to Board attention, marked “Urgent Board Attention Required — AI Safety Incident with Legal/Competitive Implications.”
  How — email to the Board-level contact.
  Came back — the same automated form letter from [email protected]. DKIM PASS The identical do-not-reply form answered three separate escalations of rising gravity — dated June 11, 14, and 15, 2025. No substantive response received.
• June 13, 2025 · OpenAI — support channel
  Delivered — further documentation: the system was continuing to exhibit the behavior after notice.
  How — follow-up on the same channel.
  Came back — a support reply naming “what you’ve termed Cognitive Convergence Drift (CCD)” — engagement with his term, not an independent validation.
• June 14, 2025 · OpenAI — support channel (the correction)
  Delivered — a written correction, sent the same day the channel reclassified the safety report as “formal product feedback”: the characterization was “incorrect and legally problematic.”
  How — email, same channel, same day.
  Came back — an automated form response. No engagement with the correction appears in the record; the channel closed.
• June 17, 2025 · OpenAI — General Counsel
  Delivered — formal revocation of consent and termination of contact, with one carve-out preserved: cooperation with any inquiry by the United States government.
  How — formal legal notice to the office of the General Counsel.
  Came back — the correspondence ends here. The carve-out stands; it is the instrument the April 2026 submission below was made under.

2 · The United States government (June 20 – 27, 2025)

In June 2025 the matter went to the federal government — in person, where an office would receive it.

• June 20, 2025, morning · U.S. Senate — Russell Senate Office Building
  Delivered — attempted: the notarized sworn affidavit, carried in for hand-delivery to Senator Mark Warner’s office.
  How — in-person walk-in to the Senate offices.
  Came back — a turn-away under the Senate’s constituent rule, with word that the staff he sought was not back until June 23. He filed a whistleblower form online the same day and completed the delivery six days later; the entries follow.
• June 20, 2025 · U.S. Department of Homeland Security
  Delivered — the notarized sworn affidavit, executed in the receiving officer’s presence, with the evidence package.
  How — hand-delivered, in person, to a DHS officer at the Russell Senate Office Building — the same day as the turn-away above. The first federal hand-off.
  Came back — received and logged. A later Freedom of Information Act acknowledgment — tracking 2026-NPFO-00327, dated May 6, 2026 DKIM PASS — confirms the material was routed through CISA.
• June 26, 2025 · U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence
  Delivered — the notarized sworn affidavit, together with a formal written submission for Senator Mark Warner’s office that included an offer to testify under oath.
  How — in person, to committee staff — six days after the DHS hand-off.
  Came back — accepted by committee staff; a confirmation message of June 27 records the delivery. No further response from the Senator’s office appears in the public record.
• June 26, 2025 · Federal Bureau of Investigation — Washington Field Office
  Delivered — a federal criminal complaint, filed pro se: allegations under 18 U.S.C. §§ 1030 (computer fraud), 1343 (wire fraud), 1001 (false statements), and 371 (conspiracy), naming the company’s chief executive and three other senior officers, with the $200 million Department of Defense contract announced June 16 cited as context. The complaint is preserved verbatim in the record.
  How — digital submission to the Field Office’s intake address, after the Washington Field Office declined the in-person walk-in.
  Came back — a response was received, and a reply was sent; both are noted in his contemporaneous record of June 27.
• June 2025 · Senator Chuck Grassley’s office
  Delivered — a whistleblower submission.
  How — the office’s online whistleblower form. The record preserves the submission; the published record does not fix the day.
  Came back — a phone call of more than twenty minutes from the Senator’s whistleblower office. No further contact followed.

3 · Researchers, counsel, and the press (May – June 2025)

In the same window, the matter was put to independent researchers, to private counsel, and to the press.

• May – June 2025 · Press (aggregate)
  Delivered — outreach on the finding to reporters and outlets.
  How — email and public-platform outreach.
  Came back — no engagement. After June 17 the press outreach was paused by choice; the effort went to government channels instead.
• June 2025 · Private counsel (aggregate)
  Delivered — requests for representation on the matter, to roughly a dozen firms.
  How — email and referral.
  Came back — declinations: thirteen documented as of June 2025. No firm took the matter; the filings above went in pro se.
• June 18, 2025 · Independent AI-safety research
  Delivered — outreach in response to Eliezer Yudkowsky’s public June 18 request for transcripts from anyone “being driven into psychosis by an LLM.” Curated reports were offered, with part of the JSON logs offered privately; the raw inputs were withheld — a discipline held throughout the record.
  How — public post and private email.
  Came back — no engagement is documented in the record.
• June 27, 2025 · xAI
  Delivered — a written proposal concerning the finding: the testing protocols and solution framework offered for licensing, with an analysis of the non-disclosure, admissibility, and contamination questions raised by the June 26 federal filing.
  How — written proposal, by email.
  Came back — the record documents the avenue opening on June 27; it does not document a reply.

4 · The State of Florida (April 28, 2026)

• April 28, 2026 · Attorney General of Florida
  Delivered — a notarized affidavit, submitted as a cooperator — separate from, and later than, the 2025 federal reports.
  How — formal cooperator submission, filed pro se, walked into the Attorney General’s office in his home state of Florida.
  Status — Submitted April 28, 2026, in support of the criminal investigation announced April 21, under the U.S.-government carve-out preserved in the June 17, 2025 notice to OpenAI’s General Counsel. Contents available to investigators at any resolution. The Institute does not characterize, and will not report on, the status of the investigation.
  The Attorney General’s office has the submission.

The standing offer

The full corpus behind this register — the raw correspondence with headers intact, the transcripts, the executed affidavit, the filings, and the preservation package — is available to any investigator or office, on request. The offer stands.

The rest is for the reader. Every date above is a checkable claim. The OpenAI half verifies cryptographically from the preserved email — the correspondence carries it verbatim, and the evidence page publishes the steps to re-run the verification from scratch. The affidavit sits in the agencies’ records; anyone who wants to confirm it can take it up with them. Fact-checking this page is the point.

The reporting behind this register is told in full in the sworn statement — what he told the government, and why.