There’s a scene in the new Elizabeth Holmes pseudo-documentary that Theranos whistleblower Tyler Shultz says almost made him jump out of his chair and yell at the screen.

In it, Holmes lays out the parts of the company’s blood testing device for filmmaker Nathan Fielder to examine. It’s supposed to be the technology at the core of one of Silicon Valley’s most infamous scandals. Except it’s not, Shultz writes in STAT.

Shultz says Holmes shows Fielder an incomplete and never-used version of the machine, not the less impressive device he helped expose. Fielder doesn’t seem to know the difference, but Shultz does.

That crucial gap, between what outsiders see and what insiders know, is also at the center of another movie in theaters right now, — a fictionalized account of how Frances Haugen blew the whistle on Facebook, alleging that the company knew the harms its products caused.

Both movies look at offenses that have already been uncovered. But taken together, their message feels especially urgent right now, as the AI era makes us more reliant on tech workers’ unsanctioned disclosures to reveal what their employers would rather we not see.

Some of the most critical warnings today about AI are coming from employees working inside the frontier labs, such as former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon, whose viral resignation post jumpstarted a global conversation about AI safety. “We are entering an era where the last line of defense between us and potentially very, very, very negative outcomes from things like super intelligence is whether or not internal employees speak the truth,” the real-life Haugen recently told NPR.

At the same moment that whistleblowing in tech is growing in necessity, it’s also becoming more complicated — and opaque. Haugen and Shultz blew the whistle on something that had already happened inside their companies, and they both had tangible evidence. AI whistleblowers like Coxon, however, are often warning about apocalyptic harms that haven’t happened yet — but they think maybe could down the line.

A line early on in neatly encapsulates the dilemma. Haugen (played by Mikey Madison) asks why Wall Street Journal journalist Jeff Horwitz (played by Jeremy Allen White) hasn’t published an article based on a tip she’d given him. He tells her, “You didn't give me a story. You told me a story. I want the internal documents. I want proof.”AI whistleblowing seems to complicate that deal. We’re being asked to believe stories about hypothetical dangers for which there may not be any documents or concrete evidence.

That puts an extraordinary amount of power into the hands of AI whistleblowers to shape the policy debate and the public conversation about a technology the rest of us are poorly equipped to understand.

“Future claims are hard to corroborate in any real way,” Texas A&M University School of Law professor Hannah Bloch-Wehba told me. “It runs the risk of enabling manipulation around public disclosures that we should be alert to.”

Bloch-Wehba has called whistleblowing both “a symptom of and a corrective to” the “radical information asymmetries” that permeate the tech industry. Pervasive non-disclosure agreements, claims of trade secrecy and regulators that often lack the will or understanding of the products they oversee have left the public reliant on insiders to know what’s happening behind tech companies’ closed doors. As Haugen said in her opening testimony before Congress, a scene captured in the movie, “Almost no one outside of Facebook knows what is happening inside.”

The industry’s secrecy means there’s more hidden information to leak, but tech workers may be especially primed to do it. They’re highly skilled, have historically been in high demand and have repeatedly demonstrated that they want a say in how their labor is being used. Their disclosures have revealed things about some of the biggest and most important companies in the tech world that we might have otherwise never known. Just consider a sampling Bloch-Wehba has catalogued in her work: Cambridge Analytica harvested Facebook user data.

Google planned to build a censored search engine for the Chinese market. AT&T cooperated with the National Security Agency’s warrantless wiretapping program. U.S. intelligence services extracted data directly from the servers of internet companies. Instagram was terrible for teen girls’ mental health. Facebook applied double standards to content moderation decisions that favored the famous and powerful. Twitter’s data security was garbage. Uber dodged its taxes.

Whistleblowing has always been embedded with its own kind of information asymmetry. Often those who are labeled a whistleblower can never get hired again, as Horowitz reminds Haugen in . (Left out of the movie is Haugen’s assertion that she had her own financial resources because she bought “crypto at the right time.” And remember that Shultz was introduced to Holmes by his grandfather, George Shultz, a former secretary of state who served on the Theranos board.)

But the riskiness of the endeavor means we only hear from the people who can afford to come forward, figuratively and literally. And we are dependent on their judgment to decide which dangers are most important and should come to light.

There are a number of ways we could help correct the imbalances in whistleblowing that AI is only exacerbating. The first, as I have argued before, is for AI engineers to professionalize, just as doctors, lawyers and accountants have. An AI version of a Hippocratic oath to do no harm would help bake a culture of responsibility into the technology before it’s released, rather than bolting on safeguards after the fact. Another is to strengthen protections for whistleblowers, which would help mitigate the personal costs of coming forward.

And if companies don’t want employees going public, they could do more than pay lip service to workers who try to sound the alarm internally first.

The correct answer is probably that we need some combination of all of the above. Haugen may be right that this moment calls for another generation of tech whistleblowers to take on the role of hero. But an industry that can’t properly function without them is sending its own kind of warning signal.