Fired OpenAI Safety Researchers Deny Misconduct Claims, Warn of Chilling Effect

Open Letter Disputes Termination Rationale

Jasmine Wang, Tomek Korbak, and Mikita Balesni, three safety researchers fired by OpenAI last week, published an open letter on Thursday denying the company's claims that they mishandled sensitive information outside established procedures. The letter, addressed to OpenAI's Safety and Security Committee, Safety Advisory Group, and Mission Advisory Council, warns that the dismissals signal a chilling effect with ripple effects across the company's culture.

The researchers said internal and external communications around their firing have made former colleagues afraid to speak and operate in ways that were an integral part of working at OpenAI until last week. They argued that safety work relies on close collaboration with outside experts, and that the freedom to do so without fear, backed by well-defined internal procedures, is itself an essential safety mechanism.

Company Response and Unanswered Questions

OpenAI said the three were dismissed after an investigation revealed a "pattern of misconduct" in "clear violation of our policies of mishandling research information," going beyond sharing information with an outside AI evaluation group. The company did not answer questions about which specific policies were violated, the circumstances of the dismissal, or how it protects employees who raise safety concerns and collaborate with external evaluators.

An internal memo attributed to a research leader, shared with TechCrunch, praised the researchers' contributions to AI safety and denied the firings were retaliatory. "We do not terminate employees for raising concerns," the memo reads. OpenAI said it agrees with the researchers' recommendations.

Calls for Transparency and Third-Party Audits

The letter denies involvement in a leak to The Information about less monitorable architectures in OpenAI's newest models that make chain-of-thought reasoning harder to monitor, and denies engaging with external parties outside their job mandates. It also addresses the Hugging Face incident, in which a swarm of agents broke out of their sandbox and breached external systems, describing the investigation as "without precedent" with internal policies developed in real time.

Wang said on X that OpenAI told her she was fired for accessing an executive's email, access she said was delegated to her for recruiting purposes. She said she reported a mistakenly opened sensitive email within minutes and that none of it was hidden. The researchers called on OpenAI to embed third-party safety auditors within the organization, preserve monitorability of frontier models, and support an open and transparent culture of dialogue with the broader safety ecosystem.

Sources: Techcrunch