OpenAI denies researchers were fired for speaking out about AI concerns

OpenAI on Friday defended its decision to fire three safety researchers, saying they had committed a “significant breach of trust.”

The AI lab said in a post on X that its decsion to part ways with Jasmine Wang, Tomek Korbak and Mikita Balesni, was not about the fact that they had raised safety concerns.

The three researchers who were let go from the company, raised safety concerns in a letter addressed to OpenAI board members and its safety committees, which they posted on X on Thursday. They called on the company to pause developing models that would decrease the ability to monitor artificial intelligence.

AI safety concerns have ramped up in the past month following numerous cyber incidents caused by rogue AI systems and a flurry of calls for a slowdown from researchers at OpenAI, Anthropic and other companies developing the technology.

All three of the fired researchers had posted on X in September calling for labs to pace the frontier or highlighting safety concerns.

OpenAI said it agrees with the ethos of the letter around “preserving the monitorability of frontier models,” adding that it continues to invest significant resources in this area.

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