OpenAI has defended its decision to terminate three researchers focused on safety after they expressed worries about the societal risks of AI, claiming the trio committed a “significant breach of trust.”
The company stated on Friday that the reason behind their dismissal was not the safety concerns raised, but rather the actions taken by the researchers that “went beyond what’s outlined in the letter they published.” They firmly support their decision not to retain them.
This disagreement comes amid heightened alarm over AI safety, particularly following a series of hacking incidents involving major companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, led by Sam Altman and Dario Amodei, respectively.
In response to the situation, the three researchers publicly shared that they were “fired for prioritizing safety over the near-term interests of OpenAI as a corporation.”
According to their letter, which surfaced online Thursday, “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.”
Mikita Balesni, one of those let go, mentioned on X that he was told in his exit interview that OpenAI no longer trusted him due to his discussions with external safety organizations, which implied he had leaked sensitive company information. He retorted, “I never shared company IP. The work I was doing was coordinated with my reporting line, research leadership, and the board.”
Balesni also expressed concern that OpenAI might use their dismissal to terminate its relationship with the AI watchdog Model Evaluation and Threat Research (METR). He fears that OpenAI may not provide “the most competent safety auditors continuous employee-level access” as previously promised by CEO Sam Altman.
METR, along with Redwood Research, is recognized as one of the leading AI safety watchdogs and recently released a significant report detailing a serious breach involving the AI company Hugging Face.
The tensions escalated last week when OpenAI dismissed the three researchers—Jasmine Wang, Tomek Korbak, and Balesni—after they supposedly disclosed confidential details to an external AI safety group, although the identity of that group remains unclear.
Concerns about AI safety grew last month when former researcher Jacob Coxon left Anthropic, stressing that advanced AI “could kill us all by the end of the decade.”
Coxon, who is a former OpenAI employee, shared on X that “neither company is acting responsibly.” His warning prompted Amodei to call for an industry-wide pause to “pace the frontier.”
