Fired OpenAI safety researchers dispute their dismissals in open letter – Engadget
Three OpenAI safety researchers have posted an open letter to OpenAI disputing their dismissals. Jasmine Wang, Mikita Balesni and Tomek Korbak wrote that the “very public manner” of the company’s communications around the firings could have a “chilling” effect on employees at a time when “the world’s safety depends on them.”
Last week, OpenAI dismissed three employees who allegedly shared information with an external AI safety organization. The company said in a statement that the employees “violat[ed] our policies on accessing and handling sensitive company information… breaking the trust essential to our work.” In the face of recent serious and potentially illegal OpenAI agent hacks of Hugging Face and other organizations, though, the firing of safety employees raised awkward questions and caught the attention of lawmakers.
“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,” the joint letter from the dismissed employees states. “We could raise safety concerns and disagree openly [before], and were encouraged to draw on the expertise of independent safety organizations. This is part of what made OpenAI special, and why we are immensely proud to have been part of the team.”
The researchers stated that they “acted in line with OpenAI’s mission and within the working norms of the time,” and that the firing “leaves us worried that the norms inside OpenAI are shifting and that employees are now unclear on where they stand.”
Addressing other rumors, Wang, Belsni and Korbak also said they were not the leak source for a The Information article involving OpenAI’s new, less monitorable architectures and don’t believe they engaged with external parties outside their mandate. They added that communication with external parties was done “in coordination and discussion with board members and the C-suite,” and that Wang notified an executive when she accidentally clicked on a sensitive email.
In parting, the former employees made several recommendations to OpenAI. They said that the company should adhere to its public commitments to embed third-party safety auditors and not use their firing as a “pretext for stepping away from those partnerships.” They added that OpenAI must preserve the monitorability of frontier models and maintain an “open and transparent culture of dialogue between its safety researchers and the rest of the safety ecosystem.”
In a thread on X, Jasmine Wang wrote that OpenAI leadership “is saying that they strongly agree with our letter,” while expressing concern about OpenAI’s, well, openness. “We were not the first to be pushed out of OpenAI under suspicious circumstances,” she wrote. “Unless employees take a stand now against this kind of maneuver, I am concerned we will not be the last. The message to everyone still at OpenAI is clear: raise concerns or work closely with outside safety groups, and you could be next, without being told why.”
