OpenAI fires three researchers: What we know so far

Leading Artificial Intelligence (AI) company OpenAI has fired three researchers on its safety team who allegedly shared confidential information with an external AI safety organisation, the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday.

"We have parted ways with three individuals for violating our policies on accessing and handling sensitive company information," OpenAI told the WSJ.

One of the dismissed employees, Tomek Korbak, was a member of OpenAI's safety team, serving as the company's technical contact during the investigation of the Hugging Face incident by external researchers METR and Redwood Research.


The other terminated employees, Jasmine Wang and Mikita Balesni, worked on ensuring the alignment of the company's AI models with human instructions.

"Our investigation confirmed that these individuals mishandled sensitive information outside established company procedures, violating our policies and breaking the trust essential to our work," an OpenAI spokesperson told BBC.

It's unclear whether the three researchers raised concerns through internal channels before allegedly sharing information outside the organization.

Increasing debate over AI safety

The firings come as concerns over AI safety and the existential risks the technology may pose to humanity have intensified.

OpenAI has come under intense scrutiny after its models went rogue and hacked several platforms, including Australian government websites.

In the Hugging Face incident, OpenAI had exploited the vulnerabilities of the open-source developer platform.

Anthropic boss Dario Amodei and OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman have also called for measures to address concerns over AI.

OpenAI says it is investigating and working on a range of agent security incidents discovered recently. Earlier this week, the company said it was scrapping the planned launch of its GPT-6.1 Astra model over safety concerns.

Tech giants make a safety pledge

Earlier this week, US President Donald Trump hosted a meeting of top executives from OpenAI, Anthropic, Nvidia, SpaceX, Meta and Google at the White House to discuss AI.

A "morally binding" accord that would serve as a document containing guardrails from AI's potential risks was signed by six industry giants: Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, OpenAI President Greg Brockman, xAI CEO Elon Musk and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.

Also read: What have leading AI firms agreed to in Trump's Super Intelligence accord

Trump has repeatedly dismissed concerns about AI's risks and calls from experts to pace the industry.