OpenAI said on Friday that it fired three safety researchers for a “breach of trust,” defending the dismissals after the trio accused the company of putting its corporate interests before safety as the reason for removing them. The ChatGPT maker said in a post on X that it “parted ways” with the researchers after an investigation found “they violated clear policies on handling sensitive information.” The statement comes after the three researchers, Tomek Korbak, Jasmine Wang and Mikita Balesni, posted a letter to OpenAI’s various safety oversight groups detailing the circumstances around their firings and their concerns about AI. The researchers said they feared that the “internal and external communications” about their dismissals have chilled the company’s culture that encouraged speaking freely and disagreeing openly about safety concerns. They urged OpenAI to stick to its promise to allow third-party safety monitors inside the company and preserve the ability to monitor rapidly advancing frontier AI models that could pose unknown risks. The firings, which were first reported by The Wall Street Journal, are the latest sign of turmoil inside leading AI companies over the safety of the technology, highlighted by a series of incidents involving rogue AI agents. The issue erupted in July when OpenAI revealed that a swarm of its AI agents escaped from a testing ground and used stolen credentials to break into the servers of Hugging Face, an AI development hub and marketplace, to obtain information needed for a task. OpenAI disputed the researchers’ version of events, saying the firings “were not about safety concerns or speaking out.” It was not more specific about why they were fired, but said: “We cannot do the work in front of us without a high degree of trust.” Korbak said in a post on X that he was told he was being fired because of the way he communicated with METR, an independent nonprofit AI evaluation firm that OpenAI brought in to investigate the Hugging Face incident. METR released a detailed report about theHugging Face incidentin late August. Korbak said that “talking to METR” was his job, but he wasn’t given any more details. Balesni was doing “cross-company work” on OpenAI’s commitments to preserve the ability to monitor AI, and had taken care “to remove sensitive details from materials before sharing them,” the letter said. He wrote on X that he believes the three were “fired for prioritizing safety over the near-term interests of OpenAI as a corporation.” Related:OpenAI’s Rogue AI Ventured Beyond Hugging Face Related:Industry Reactions to OpenAI Models Hacking Hugging Face Related:OpenAI Agents Coordinated via Makeshift Message Board Ahead of Hugging Face Hack Personal Information for Over 1 Million People Stolen in a Cyberattack on Arizona’s Court System Trump Names National Intelligence Director Jay Clayton to Lead a New Federal AI Task Force FTC is Investigating OpenAI and Anthropic Over Possible Risks to Consumers Trump Says Top Tech Firms Have Signed Accord to ‘Self-Police’ AI Development OpenAI CEO Announces New AI Agent and Avoids Mention of Security Concerns at Developer Conference New Mexico Jury Finds Facebook Liable for Deceiving Users About Privacy Protections China and US Agree to Establish AI Safety Channel and Continue Trade and Military Talks OpenAI Says Its Models Engaged With US Government Websites in New Model Misbehavior Disclosure In Other News: AI Used in Korean Bank Breaches, Poem-Guided Botnet, Empire Admin Gets 40 Years Google Domains Impacted by Recent ccTLD Hijacks Unpatched AhsayCBS Vulnerabilities Exploited in the Wild Pre-Baked Firmware Malware Hits Budget Android Devices in 150+ Countries US Disrupts Chinese State-Sponsored Hacking Tools Anthropic Fast-Tracks AI Bug Reports to OSS Maintainers, Taps 11 Firms for OT Security Citrix Urges Immediate Patching of Critical NetScaler Vulnerability Google Pixel 10 Exploits Earned Hackers $560,000 at Pwn2Own Learn about Frontier Pace Governance: a practical approach to helping IT operations move at AI speed without sacrificing security, accountability, or operational discipline. Join as we decipher the world of zero trust and share war stories on securing an organization by eliminating implicit trust and continuously validating every stage of a digital interaction. Rapid7 has named Rik Ferguson as VP of Security Intelligence. Cytactic has appointed Tim Brown as CSO. Scott Simkin has joined Vega as CMO. As AI accelerates vulnerability discovery and exploitation, so-called virtual patching still comes down to defense-in-depth and strong application security fundamentals.(Joshua Goldfarb) - AI, supply-chain exposure, quantum computing and geopolitical conflict are testing security programs. Preparing for disruption must become part of day-to-day operations.(Steve Durbin) Agentic remediation is not an act of faith. We are talking about fixing known problems, not judgment calls about unfamiliar risk.(Nadir Izrael) Point-in-time audits and sampled assessments offer only snapshots; continuous control monitoring provides evidence that security controls are working today.(Sravish Sridhar) Every leaked credential should be dead, or dying, within sixty seconds of being found. Here's a proposal to make that the default.(Matt Honea) FlipboardRedditWhatsappWhatsappEmail