OpenAI fires 3 safety researchers; Balesni and peers demand written reasons

The letter was addressed to OpenAI's Safety and Security Committee, its Safety Advisory Group (SAG), and its Mission Advisory Council, and it warns that the way the dismissals were handled — and explained, inside and outside the company — is having a chilling effect on the employees who remain. All three researchers worked on monitorability, keeping an AI's chain of thought visible to human oversight. Korbak and Balesni had also taken part in the investigation of a July breach at Hugging Face, and Korbak served as the technical contact with METR, the U.S. organization that ran the external review.

In his own account, Balesni said his exit interview told him he had talked too much with outside safety research organizations and was therefore no longer trustworthy, and that he was left with the implication he had leaked intellectual property — which he denies, saying his work was coordinated with his manager, research executives, and the board. Wang said the only reason she was given was accessing an executive's email, an access she says the company granted her for recruiting, that she asked IT to remove unused, and that she reported within minutes when she opened a sensitive message by mistake. She has asked for any other reasons in writing.

The letter also says the three were not the sources for a U.S. The Information article about a new architecture that is hard to monitor, and it says suspicions that they shared board-level documents were never put to them and they had no chance to respond. On September 12, CEO Sam Altman had said on X that he agreed with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei on giving independent evaluators the same access as employees; Balesni said he worries the firings will be used as a pretext to cut the METR relationship, and Wang urged the attorneys general of California and Delaware to make OpenAI keep that promise. OpenAI's statement says the decision was not about safety concerns, that it has never fired anyone for raising them, and it thanks the three for their past contributions.