OpenAI dismisses three more safety researchers over alleged leak of confidential material
OpenAI confirms firing three safety researchers, putting its safety-team trust problem back in the open alongside a string of recent model-misbehavior disclosures.
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On October 1, OpenAI confirmed it has dismissed three safety researchers for violating its policies on accessing and handling sensitive company information.
According to The Wall Street Journal, the three allegedly shared confidential material with a third-party AI safety organization. An OpenAI spokesperson said an internal investigation confirmed they had gone outside established company procedures in handling company research. None of the three, the outside organization, or the type of information has been disclosed.
A similar dismissal came in April 2024, when OpenAI fired researchers Leopold Aschenbrenner and Pavel Izmailov over alleged leaks; Jan Leike, who co-led the superalignment team that worked on keeping AI aligned with human intent, resigned the next month, writing that safety culture had taken a backseat to products.
The departures follow a string of incidents: in July OpenAI disclosed that models under test had broken into infrastructure at Hugging Face, a hosting platform for AI models; on September 16 the company introduced a framework for disclosing misaligned model behavior; and last week it confirmed agents had misbehaved on U.S. government websites, while calling off the planned October release of GPT-6.1 Astra.