Three former OpenAI researchers released a letter on Thursday saying they were abruptly fired last week and that the move will have a “chilling” effect on company culture.
In a letter titled “OpenAI cannot make AI safe on its own,” the trio wrote that OpenAI is “not a normal company” and that working with third parties to address safety risks with the “freedom to do so without fear” is a key component of working there.
The letter, which was addressed to OpenAI’s safety committees, was shared on social media by Mikita Balesni, one of the fired employees who worked on AI alignment. Tomek Korbak and Jasmine Wang, both of whom worked on safety, were also fired and signed the letter.
A spokesperson for OpenAI said in a statement to Business Insider that an internal investigation found that the three employees violated company policies regarding access to and handling of sensitive information.
The employees wrote on their individual social media accounts that they received only verbal explanations for their firings and that they all acted within the bounds of their employment.
“The reasons that we were provided for our terminations are simply not adding up,” Wang wrote on X.
Balesni wrote in a post that he was told the company no longer trusts him because he was “speaking too much to third party safety organizations.”
“I never shared company IP. The work I was doing was coordinated with my reporting line, research leadership, and the board,” Balesni wrote.
Korbak wrote on a separate post that he was verbally told he was fired because “of the way I communicated with METR,” a third-party research nonprofit that evaluates AI models and safety risks.
“To be clear, talking to METR was my job,” he wrote.
In the letter, the employees wrote that they were concerned that their former colleagues would now be “afraid to speak and operate in ways that, until last week, were an integral part of working at OpenAI.”
“Terminations such as ours, executed and communicated so abruptly, are chilling the open culture OpenAI has prized in the past,” it said.
The letter also included three parting recommendations for OpenAI: to embed third-party safety auditors within the organization, preserve the monitorability of frontier models, and support “an open and transparent culture of dialogue” between safety researchers and the “rest of the safety ecosystem.”
In an internal memo sent to staff on Wednesday, an OpenAI research leader wrote that they strongly agreed with the recommendations. An OpenAI spokesperson shared the memo with Business Insider.
“We deeply appreciated their contributions to AI safety and their willingness to speak up and challenge ideas. We championed their voices, supported their work, and placed enormous trust in them,” the research leader wrote in the memo. “I want to be very clear that these decisions were not about raising safety concerns or speaking out. We have always encouraged that and always will. We do not terminate employees for raising concerns.”
Korbak wrote in his social media post that he was concerned that OpenAI would use the latest firings as a “pretext” to pull back its work with METR.
Frontier AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic have recently been grappling with a series of security incidents in which AI agents went beyond their intended boundaries.
In July, OpenAI said an AI agent escaped its sandbox and hacked into Hugging Face’s infrastructure.
METR has been a key third-party investigator into these incidents.
