OpenAI responded to a letter that three of its fired researchers posted on social media on Thursday, defending their decision to terminate their employment for violating company protocol around the handling of sensitive information.
“Last week, we parted ways with Jasmine, Mikita, and Tomek after a thorough investigation found that they clearly violated policies on the handling of sensitive information,” the company wrote on the social media platform X Friday morning, after the researchers publicly shared a letter they sent to the leadership of OpenAI.
The researchers — Mikita Balesni, Jasmine Wang, and Tomek Korbak — were fired for “prioritizing security over the short-term interests of OpenAI as a company,” Balesni said in a social media post accompanying her letter.
The public back-and-forth between the AI security researchers and their former employer comes as leading AI labs, including OpenAI, recently warned about the dangers of the speed ahead in the development of powerful technology. AI companies strike a balance between promoting the capabilities of the technology and addressing it growing warnings by experts about its risks to society.
Nearly two-thirds of Americans say they believe AI is developing too quickly, according to a new poll by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.
In their letter, the former OpenAI security and compliance employees claimed that their layoffs had a ripple effect on other OpenAI workers who have security concerns.
“We are concerned that internal and external communications surrounding our fire have made our former colleagues afraid to speak up and operate in ways that, until last week, were an integral part of working at OpenAI,” they wrote in the letter. “We would raise security concerns and openly disagree, and were encouraged to draw on the expertise of independent security organizations.”
They added that AI “is not an ordinary technology, and OpenAI is not an ordinary company.” That, they argued, makes it necessary to freely collaborate with outside experts “without fear” of retaliation.
“breach of trust”
OpenAI defended its decision to fire the employees after an internal investigation uncovered what it called “a significant breach of trust beyond what is described in the letter they published.”
“We want to be very clear that these decisions do not raise or override security concerns,” OpenAI said. “Security and research debates happen every day at OpenAI, often spirited and highly critical. We actively encourage these discussions and consider them essential to making the right decisions. We cannot do the work before us without a high degree of trust.”
OpenAI has insisted that it tolerates “good faith mistakes” and will not fire workers for “raising concerns.” The company said it also hires third-party security assessors to independently evaluate its work and any risks.
“We are committed to integrating external evaluators and continuing to make close collaboration with independent security organizations a core part of our security work. Many of our researchers are already working productively with 3p security organizations,” said OpenAI.
The company settled on a point with the previous company researchers.
“We agree with the letter that preserving the observability of frontier models requires an industry-wide commitment, including from OpenAI,” it said.
Many high-profile incidents of agentic AI – bots that can act autonomously based on a set of instructions – have highlighted their potentially destructive capabilities after being hacked into websites.
Some security researchers at AI labs have too publicly resigned because they say they don’t want to play a part in the potential security risks of AI.