OpenAI Says Three Fired Safety Researchers Got The Boot Over ‘Breach Of Trust,’ Not Their Warnings

A frontier artificial intelligence firm says it fired safety researchers for breaking its trust, not for blowing the whistle.

OpenAI unveiled on Friday that an internal probe found “a significant breach of trust” by three former safety researchers: Mikita Balesni, Tomek Korbak and Jasmine Wang —hours after the group released a letter warning that the company’s handling of their firing has made colleagues afraid to speak up. This comes as the tech giant faces bipartisan pressure from the Senate with a potential bill to hold AI companies liable for agent hacking incidents and a copyright lawsuit from USA Today.

“Our internal investigation uncovered a significant breach of trust beyond what’s outlined in the letter they published and we stand by the decision to not continue their employment,” OpenAI said on X in a Friday note from its research leaders. “We have not and do not terminate any of our employees for raising concerns.”

The company said the research trio broke policies on handling sensitive information, according to the Friday note.

The ChatGPT maker also said it shares the researchers’ view that keeping frontier models must be monitored by the company and the industry, the note stated. (RELATED: Top Federal Regulator Opens Probe Into Whether AI Will Kill Us All)

OpenAI referred the Daily Caller News Foundation to its Friday newsroom X post when asked for comment.

“I believe we were fired for prioritizing safety over the near-term interests of OpenAI as a corporation,” Balesni said in a Thursday post on X, sharing the researchers’ letter to company leadership.

“We have become concerned that internal and external communications around our firing have made our former colleagues afraid to speak and operate in ways that, until last week, were an integral part of working at OpenAI,” the letter states in part.

Two other safety researchers and I were fired from OpenAI last week. We wrote this letter to leadership. I believe we were fired for prioritizing safety over the near-term interests of OpenAI as a corporation. https://t.co/ALANn9B87S

The researchers argued that superintelligence cannot be developed safely unless staff can collaborate openly within the company and with outside experts, according to the letter.

Korbak claimed in a Thursday X post that the company does not trust him anymore, and he was verbally fired after communicating with METR, the research organization that investigated OpenAI’s agents after they hacked New York City-based AI Hugging Face in July.

Last week I was called into a meeting with OpenAI’s head of safety and told they no longer trust me. A security guard took my badge and walked me out of the building. Then I learned my colleagues @balesni and @j_asminewang had been fired too. Why did OpenAI suddenly stop trusting us? This summer OpenAI’s agents escaped containment and hacked the AI company Hugging Face. Outside auditors @METR_evals investigated it and revealed the scale of this incident. I was OpenAI’s main technical point of contact with them. I was told verbally I was fired because of the way I communicated with METR. No details on what I said or did or when. No other reasons were given and nothing was put in writing. To be clear, talking to METR was my job. For months, I’d been raising safety concerns that we’re losing the ability to monitor what AI agents think, one of our best tools for catching when they misbehave. I believe that was why I was fired. I am now worried that OpenAI will use our firings as a pretext to pull back from METR. So @balesni and @j_asminewang wrote to OpenAI’s leadership to raise our concerns once more. We’re sharing this letter below.

The fired researcher served as OpenAI’s technical point of contact for METR during the investigation into the Hugging Face incident, according to the letter.

”!!” SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said in response to Korbak.

OpenAI was hit with a copyright lawsuit from USA Today on Thursday, which alleges the company fed hundreds of thousands of its stories into ChatGPT’s training, according to the lawsuit. The newspaper company is asking for $250 million in damages.