OpenAI shows three staff the door over alleged information misuse

Two safety researchers and a program manager dismissed, company denies retaliation for raising concerns

OpenAI has fired two safety researchers and a program manager for allegedly mishandling sensitive company information.

The ChatGPT maker confirmed the dismissals to The Register, saying an internal investigation found the trio had violated company rules governing access to and handling of confidential information.

"We have parted ways with three individuals for violating our policies on accessing and handling sensitive company information," an OpenAI spokesperson said. "Our investigation confirmed that these individuals mishandled sensitive information outside established company procedures, violating our policies and breaking the trust essential to our work."

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At least some of the information was allegedly shared with an outside organization that evaluates AI systems. OpenAI said its investigation found other misconduct beyond that disclosure, but has not described it or identified the organization.

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The ChatGPT creator said the employees were not dismissed for raising AI safety concerns.

The firings come after a messy few months for OpenAI's safety teams, including an incident in which one of its agents compromised infrastructure belonging to AI platform Hugging Face.

OpenAI subsequently brought in external experts to investigate what happened and published findings detailing the agent's behavior and the security failures that allowed it to reach Hugging Face.

The incident also prompted a much wider trawl through OpenAI's logs for other examples of agents interacting with external systems. This week, OpenAI said it has now notified more than 100 organizations about activity linked to its agents.

Being contacted doesn't necessarily mean an organization was hacked or that private data was accessed. OpenAI said the notifications cover cases where agents interacted with third-party systems without authorization or in ways that warranted alerting their operators.

OpenAI's investigation has also found cases where its agents sent training and evaluation data to third-party services. In 53 instances, images originally uploaded by ChatGPT users ended up on image-hosting sites.

On September 20, an agent contacted an external chatbot through insufficiently filtered DNS traffic in a training environment intended to block live internet access. OpenAI's monitoring system spotted the behavior within 15 minutes and a human reviewer picked up the alert three minutes later, but the run wasn't actually killed for another two and a half hours.

OpenAI has also scrapped the planned release of GPT-6.1 Astra after concluding the model didn't meet its safety bar around remaining within the scope and authorization of tasks it was given.

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The US biz hasn't said whether the allegedly mishandled material concerned any of its recent agent incidents, whether the outside organization was involved in investigating them, or whether any customer or user information was exposed. ®