OpenAI defended its high-profile firing of three leading artificial intelligence (AI) safety researchers on Friday (October 9), stating that the terminations were prompted by a “significant breach of trust” and clear data security policy violations rather than internal whistleblowing over technology risks. In an official statement published on X (formerly Twitter), the Sam Altman-led company identified the sacked staff members as Jasmine Wang, Tomek Korbak and Mikita Balesni – pushing back against claims that the trio was penalised for flagging technological hazards, and the disciplinary action was tied strictly to information handling rather than their safety advocacy.
Last week we parted ways with Jasmine, Mikita, and Tomek after a thorough investigation found they violated clear policies on handling sensitive information. 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. We generally keep individual employment matters private and don’t believe a back and forth would be productive or lead to a resolution, but we want to address the points they raised in their letter directly. Safety and research debates happen every day at OpenAI, often spirited and highly critical. We actively encourage these discussions and consider them essential to making the right decisions. We cannot do the work in front of us without a high degree of trust. We will continue to be extremely forgiving of our team making good-faith mistakes. We have not and do not terminate any of our employees for raising concerns.
Monitorability has long been a core piece of our research program, and something we continue to invest significant resources in (see our publications on Monitoring Monitorability and the subsequent open sourcing of monitorability evals, our system card for GPT-6 Astra, Jakub’s blog and post on X, and the numerous blog posts on our Alignment blog on the topic). The public explanation follows a joint open letter published on X by the three researchers on Thursday (October 8), addressed directly to OpenAI’s board of directors and internal safety committees. – We agree with the letter that preserving the monitorability of frontier models requires an industry-wide commitment, including from OpenAI. We are deeply sad about this outcome. We appreciated Jasmine, Mikita, and Tomek’s contributions to AI safety at OpenAI and their willingness to speak up and challenge ideas. We championed their voices, supported their work, and placed enormous trust in them. These decisions were not about them raising safety concerns. We have always encouraged that and always will. In that appeal, the researchers urged the tech lab to temporarily halt the creation of frontier models that could compromise engineers’ capacity to monitor and control artificial intelligence systems.