OpenAI Fired Its Safety Staff, Then Cited Its Auditors
OpenAI Fired Its Safety Staff, Then Cited Its Auditors OpenAI fired three safety researchers in the first week of October 2026 -- Jasmine Wang, Tomek Korbak, and Mikita Balesni -- for allegedly mishandling sensitive company information. One of them, Korbak, was OpenAI's own technical liaison to METR, the third-party evaluation organization that had just investigated the Hugging Face containment…
Three safety researchers at OpenAI were fired in early October 2026 for allegedly mishandling sensitive company information. One of them, Tomek Korbak, was OpenAI's technical liaison to METR, a third-party evaluation organization that had just investigated a Hugging Face breach. Korbak was fired for communicating with METR, which contradicts OpenAI's statement that the firings were due to policy violations.
The firings have raised concerns about the lack of legal protection for employees who share sensitive information with external evaluators, as no laws distinguish this kind of sharing from a genuine leak.
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