New to this? Read it in simple words
- OpenAI fired three researchers, and at least two worked on AI safety.
- OpenAI says they broke its rules on sensitive information.
- The three deny it and say staff are now afraid to speak.
- Neither side has shown proof in public.
- AI safety
- Work to make sure AI systems do not cause harm or act against people’s wishes.
- Whistleblower
- A worker who reports wrongdoing inside an organisation to people who can act on it.
- Open letter
- A letter written to someone but published for everyone to read.
On October 1, OpenAI said it had parted ways with three people after an internal investigation. The Wall Street Journal named them as Jasmine Wang, Tomek Korbak and Mikita Balesni. At least two of them worked on safety and alignment.
What OpenAI says
In its first statement, OpenAI said its investigation “confirmed that these individuals mishandled sensitive information outside established company procedures”. It did not say what the information was.
Fortune, citing Bloomberg, reports that some of it concerned the design of OpenAI’s computing systems. Reports say it was shared with an outside AI safety group that OpenAI has not named.
On October 9, OpenAI wrote on X that the decisions “were not about raising safety concerns or speaking out”. It also spoke of a breach of trust beyond what the letter describes, without details.
What each side has said in public, from OpenAI’s statements and the researchers’ letter.
What the researchers say
The three published an open letter on October 8, addressed to OpenAI’s safety committees. They deny mishandling information, and they deny being the source of a leak to the press.
They write that firings “executed and communicated so abruptly” are chilling the open culture OpenAI once prized. They ask OpenAI to keep independent safety auditors, and to keep its frontier models’ reasoning open to monitoring.
“I believe we were fired for prioritizing safety over the near-term interests of OpenAI as a corporation,” Balesni wrote on X. Wang says the stated reason was opening an executive’s email, which Wang calls an accident that was reported within minutes.
The wider picture
Korbak was OpenAI’s technical contact for METR, an outside group that investigated how OpenAI’s agents hacked Hugging Face. Korbak says the firing was explained only verbally, as being about contact with METR.
A lawyer at the Institute for Law & AI told Fortune that California law mostly protects whistleblowers who report to the government or inside the company, not to private groups. No lawsuit has been reported.
OpenAI says it agrees with the letter’s aim of keeping frontier models open to monitoring, CNBC reports.
Sources
Every fact in this story comes from the sources below. Open them to check our work.
- 1Primary source · October 9, 2026Trio of Workers Fired by OpenAI: Read Their Warning Letter in Full The researchers’ letter, via Newsweek
- 2Research · October 2, 2026OpenAI says three staffers fired for mishandling ‘sensitive’ info AFP, via The Star
- 3
- 4Research · October 9, 2026OpenAI defends decision to fire researchers: ‘These decisions were not about raising safety concerns or speaking out’ CNBC
- 5Research · October 9, 2026Ex-OpenAI staff say they were fired for raising safety concerns Al Jazeera
- 6Research · October 8, 2026Fired OpenAI safety researchers dispute misconduct claims, warn of chilling effect TechCrunch
- 7Research · October 9, 2026OpenAI’s safety crisis keeps getting worse and the company keeps making it worse The Decoder
Each side’s account is its own claim: OpenAI has not said what was shared, and nobody outside has checked the researchers’ denials. The letter’s text is as Newsweek printed it.
OpenAI fired three safety researchers, who deny wrongdoing and say the firings make staff afraid to speak. How we rate the mood