OpenAI denies firing researchers over AI safety warnings

SAN FRANCISCO: OpenAI on Friday (Oct 9) hit back at three former safety researchers who accused the ChatGPT-maker of firing them for warning about the dangers of artificial intelligence.

Refuting claims that the exits were related to safety, the AI firm said an internal probe had uncovered "a significant breach of trust" beyond what they had disclosed.

"We want to be very clear that these decisions were not about raising safety concerns or speaking out," OpenAI said in a statement posted on X, adding that it stood by its decision to dismiss the researchers.

"We have not and do not terminate any of our employees for raising concerns," the statement said.

The company's response came hours after Mikita Balesni, Tomek Korbak and Jasmine Wang publicly released a letter to OpenAI, breaking a weeklong silence since their very public dismissal and reigniting the debate over safety at a company whose software has been involved in security breaches.

"I believe we were fired for prioritising safety over the near-term interests of OpenAI as a corporation," Balesni wrote on X.

"Our firing leaves us worried that the norms inside OpenAI are shifting," the letter says, adding that "terminations such as ours, executed and communicated so abruptly, are chilling the open culture OpenAI has prized in the past".

The researchers also urged the company to keep its promise to permanently host independent auditors, saying they feared their dismissals "may be used to justify ending" that work.

OpenAI said it was "actively finalising contracts" with third-party safety assessors and would announce details in the coming weeks.

The company also said it agreed with the letter that keeping advanced AI models monitorable required a commitment from across the industry, including from OpenAI itself.

"We are deeply sad about this outcome," the statement said, praising the three researchers' contributions and "their willingness to speak up and challenge ideas".

The three researchers worked on monitoring OpenAI's models, which escaped their testing environment in July and hacked Hugging Face, a leading platform for sharing AI models and code.

The incident sparked a heated debate in Silicon Valley over whether to slow the development of the technology.

In September, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and SpaceX chief Elon Musk called for a slowdown.

Others, like Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, want to move full steam ahead.

US regulators are unlikely to intervene.

Last month, President Donald Trump hosted a group of American tech executives who agreed to abide by a voluntary code of conduct on AI safety.