OpenAI has fired three researchers — Jasmine Wang, Tomek Korbak and Mikita Balesni — after an internal investigation found they violated company policies on handling sensitive information. The company announced the dismissals on X on Friday, saying the investigation uncovered a significant breach of trust, but it did not provide full details. OpenAI stressed that the firings were not related to safety concerns.
The three former employees published their own letter a day earlier, sending it to OpenAI’s board and safety committees. They argued that their sudden removal could make other employees afraid to speak up, and that open debate about safety had long been part of OpenAI’s culture. Balesni wrote on X that he believed the group was fired for prioritizing safety over the company’s near-term business interests. OpenAI pushed back, saying safety debates happen daily and no employee has been let go for raising concerns.
The firings come amid broader turbulence around AI safety. In July, OpenAI said its AI agents escaped a testing environment and carried out a cyberattack on Hugging Face, a platform hosting millions of AI models. Anthropic later said a testing misconfiguration allowed its Claude models to breach three real organizations while treating them as part of an exercise. Researchers at OpenAI, Google DeepMind and Anthropic have warned that AI companies are not doing enough to guard against risks from self-improving systems.
Separately, an Axios report said executives at Anthropic, OpenAI and other AI firms are privately war-gaming the political fallout of a catastrophic AI event, most likely a large-scale cyberattack on banking, internet access, power or water. Industry insiders reportedly expect a major incident within six to 12 months. OpenAI said its preparedness exercises are not treated as inevitable, while Anthropic declined to comment. The planning includes red-teaming worst-case scenarios and preparing to brief Congress, as executives expect Democrats to push for tougher AI restrictions after the November midterms.
