Trio of Workers Fired by OpenAI: Read Their Warning Letter in Full
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0 Share Newsweek is a Trust Project member See more of our trusted coverage when you search. Prefer Newsweek on Google to see more of our trusted coverage when you search. Three safety researchers fired by OpenAI last week have published an open letter challenging the company's account of their dismissals. They warned that the episode could discourage employees from speaking openly about AI risks .
Tomek Korbak, Jasmine Wang and Mikita Balesni addressed the letter to OpenAI's Safety and Security Committee, Safety Advisory Group and Mission Advisory Council.
The trio wrote that they were concerned that communications around their firing had made former colleagues "afraid to speak." They added that safety researchers need to be able to challenge decisions and work with outside experts. Korbak, Wang and Balesni said: " AI is not a normal technology, and OpenAI is not a normal company."
OpenAI has rejected the suggestion that their dismissals were connected to speaking out about safety. The company said a "thorough investigation" found the trio had violated policies governing sensitive information.
Newsweek has contacted OpenAI, Korbak, Wang and Balesni for further comment and is awaiting further responses.
The letter, titled "OpenAI cannot make AI safe on its own," was published publicly by the three former employees. It opens with a warning about the effect their dismissals may have on other employees. "We have become concerned that internal and external communications around our firing have made our former colleagues afraid to speak and operate in ways that, until last week, were an integral part of working at OpenAI," the former employees wrote.
The researchers argue that OpenAI has historically encouraged employees to "raise safety concerns and disagree openly," but say staff are now "unclear on where they stand."
The trio added: "Given the significant safety concerns surrounding the development of AI, employees must not be left working in an environment where fear and unclear rules stymie AI safety work and weaken third-party accountability."
Korbak, Wang and Balesni used the letter to dispute claims surrounding what led to their terminations. They denied being responsible for a leak about work on AI architectures that may make models' internal reasoning more difficult to monitor. "We were not the source of the leak," they wrote.
They also denied improperly communicating with outside organizations, saying they did not believe they had engaged with external parties beyond what their jobs required.
Korbak said separately that he was told verbally that he had been fired because of the way he communicated with Model Evaluation and Threat Research, or METR, an independent organization that evaluates advanced AI systems.
"No details on what I said or did or when," Korbak wrote on X. "No other reasons were given and nothing was put in writing." He added: "To be clear, talking to METR was my job."
Korbak said he had spent months raising concerns about what he described as a declining ability to monitor how AI agents reason. "I believe that was why I was fired," he said.
The open letter also discusses Korbak's work following an incident involving OpenAI agents and external systems. The researchers described the incident and subsequent investigation as "without precedent" and said that "internal policies were being developed in real time."
They argue that Korbak believed he was acting within OpenAI's existing norms by communicating with outside safety evaluators.
Balesni has gone further in publicly challenging OpenAI's explanation for the dismissals. "I believe we were fired for prioritizing safety over the near-term interests of OpenAI as a corporation," he wrote on X.
Balesni said that during his exit call he was told OpenAI no longer trusted him because he had been speaking too much with third-party safety organizations, which he said implied that he had leaked company intellectual property. "I never shared company IP," he wrote.
He said his work had been coordinated with his reporting line, research leadership and the board. The open letter says Balesni was working on the problem of preserving AI "monitorability," researchers' ability to understand or inspect how increasingly advanced systems arrive at decisions. The trio wrote that this work "can only succeed through extensive communication with external parties."
They said Balesni regularly checked with his managers and removed sensitive material before sharing research externally. "Throughout, Mikita checked in with his reporting line and took care to remove sensitive details from materials before sharing them," they wrote. "He acted throughout in good faith and within the company's norms as they stood at the time."
Wang has also publicly disputed OpenAI's explanation. She said she was given one reason for her dismissal: that she had accessed an executive's email. "OpenAI delegated that access to me for recruiting," she wrote on X. "When I no longer needed it, I asked IT to remove it."
Wang said that request was not actioned and that she could not remove the account herself. "When I opened a sensitive email by mistake, I told the executive within minutes and asked IT again," she wrote. "None of this was hidden."
Wang claimed the explanations provided for the firings were "simply not adding up." She called on OpenAI to provide the former employees with a written list of allegations so they could respond.
"I would welcome receipt of a written and complete list of allegations so that we can properly address their merits, take ownership of them where we ought to, and have OpenAI take ownership of any mistakes they have made," she wrote.
The former employees set out several recommendations for OpenAI and other frontier AI companies. They called for continued independent safety evaluations and warned against weakening relationships with outside organizations capable of…
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