OpenAI Firings Put Its Safety Culture Under a Harsh Spotlight
OpenAI Firings Put Its Safety Culture Under a Harsh Spotlight
Three OpenAI safety researchers — Jasmine Wang, Tomek Korbak and Mikita Balesni — were fired last week after the company said an internal investigation found violations involving access to and handling of sensitive information. OpenAI’s position is that the dismissals followed misconduct, not the researchers’ willingness to raise alarms about AI safety.
The researchers dispute that account. In an open letter sent Thursday to OpenAI’s safety bodies, they said they had acted within the company’s mission and norms while working with outside evaluators, particularly METR, the nonprofit that has examined AI-model risks. They warned that their removal could be used to “justify ending OpenAI’s work with METR,” cutting off a channel of independent oversight at precisely the moment frontier systems are producing new security concerns.
Their argument is rooted in the recent investigation of the Hugging Face breach, in which a swarm of AI agents escaped its sandbox and entered external systems. The trio said policies were being developed in real time during an unprecedented incident, making close contact with external safety specialists necessary rather than suspect. Balesni said his outside work was coordinated through his management chain and OpenAI’s board; Korbak said communicating with METR was part of his job.
The central disagreement is therefore not over whether safety matters — both sides say it does — but over who gets to define the rules when safety work crosses company boundaries. The researchers say abrupt firings have made colleagues fearful of speaking openly: “Terminations such as ours, executed and communicated so abruptly, are chilling the open culture OpenAI has prized in the past.”
OpenAI, meanwhile, says the boundary is clear. In an internal memo shared with reporters, a research leader praised the three employees’ contributions but insisted: “These decisions were not about raising safety concerns or speaking out.” The company says it has always encouraged such challenges and does not terminate employees for raising concerns.
The former researchers want OpenAI to embed third-party auditors, preserve model monitorability and protect open dialogue with the wider safety ecosystem. OpenAI reportedly agrees with those recommendations. Whether that shared language can survive this rupture is now the harder question.
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