Fired OpenAI safety researchers: firings scare staff

The dispute did not start with the Hugging Face hack. In May 2024, OpenAI's head of super AI safety Jan Leike publicly criticized the company, saying safety culture and processes were falling behind its shiny products, and left for Anthropic. Since then OpenAI has moved from one incident to the next, and the Hugging Face hack pushed that pattern further: the investigation went well beyond Hugging Face itself, and the three researchers now at the center of the letter were directly involved in it. Korbak served as OpenAI's primary technical contact for METR, the outside lab that examined the incident, while Balesni worked on industry-wide commitments to AI model monitorability. Wang's case is separate — she had delegated access to an executive's recruiting inbox that IT never removed, and she reported opening a sensitive email within minutes.

The letter also pushes back on how the story has been told outside the company. The three deny being the source of a leak to The Information about allegedly new, less monitorable architectures, and say that article actually hurt their own efforts to set industry-wide restrictions on non-monitorable architectures. They describe the Hugging Face investigation as unprecedented, with internal guidelines being written in real time, and say Balesni kept board members and senior leadership in the loop while stripping sensitive details from shared materials.

The gap between the two accounts is now the story. The researchers describe being told verbally that Korbak was fired over how he communicated with METR, with nothing put in writing, and say the rumors about a board-level memo were never raised with them. OpenAI counters with an investigation it does not detail, published through @OpenAINewsroom, the company's smallest-audience channel. OpenAI does confirm it is working on contracts with external safety auditors and agrees frontier model monitorability needs an industry-wide commitment — points that overlap with the researchers' demands, though the question of how far those auditors can reach inside the company appears to remain open.