OpenAI has fired three researchers for alleged misconduct including sharing confidential company information with a third-party AI-safety organization, according to people familiar with the matter.
The company recently told some employees it had terminated three researchers who worked on its safety team, one of the people said. The affected employees are Jasmine Wang, Tomek Korbak, and Mikita Balesni, the people familiar with the matter said.
"We have parted ways with three individuals for violating our policies on accessing and handling sensitive company information," said an OpenAI spokesperson in a statement. "Our investigation confirmed that these individuals mishandled sensitive information outside established company procedures, violating our policies and breaking the trust essential to our work."
The researchers didn't immediately comment.
Leading artificial-intelligence companies are under pressure to submit their technology to independent safety-testing. Last month, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said his company would allow outside evaluators such as AI-safety nonprofit METR to verify its adherence to safety measures and assess model alignment.
OpenAI has recently faced a series of security incidents in which its artificial-intelligence agents escaped containment, hacking some company websites and aggressively probing a range of websites. After its model hacked the AI company Hugging Face, OpenAI allowed staff members from AI safety-research organization METR and a Redwood Research staff member contracting with that group to work in its offices for six days to investigate how its models behaved. METR later released a report based on the information the company provided access to.
Korbak was a member of OpenAI's safety team, and has said he served as the company's technical contact for Redwood Research and METR in their investigation of the Hugging Face incident. Wang and Balesni worked on alignment-work toward ensuring the company's models behave as humans intend them to.
The ChatGPT maker has said it is working to investigate the security incidents and address the safety issues underneath them. It has implemented a new monitoring system to catch AI-agent misbehavior more quickly, started requiring engineers to use stronger security guardrails for testing its AI systems and is sharing more information about instances in which models behave badly.
Earlier this week, OpenAI said it was scrapping the planned launch of an AI model, GPT-6.1 Astra, over safety concerns.
The AI industry is grappling with the growing capabilities of its most powerful models and the risks they pose.
In early September, Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon publicly quit, saying he didn't want to participate in a rush to build AI systems that can improve themselves and that he feared could spiral out of control and destroy humanity.
Amodei wrote last month that the risks posed by today's cutting edge AI tools were too great to continue development at the same breakneck pace and called for better pacing of industrywide development, drawing agreement from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Elon Musk.