Fired researchers accuse OpenAI of 'chilling' safety efforts

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Mikita Balesni and the two other fired employees, Tomek Korbak and Jasmine Wang, publicly shared a letter to OpenAI on Thursday [File] | Photo Credit: REUTERS

Three former OpenAI security researchers on Thursday accused the ChatGPT-maker of firing them for warning about the dangers of artificial intelligence, reigniting the debate over safety at a company whose software has been involved in security breaches.

"I believe we were fired for prioritizing safety over the near-term interests of OpenAI as a corporation," one of the fired staffers, Mikita Balesni, wrote on X, breaking a weeklong silence since their very public dismissal.

Balesni and the two other fired employees, Tomek Korbak and Jasmine Wang, publicly shared a letter to OpenAI on Thursday.

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

They also call on the company to keep its promise to permanently host independent auditors.

"We are concerned that our firings may be used to justify ending" that work, the letter says.

OpenAI, for its part, said it fired them for allegedly violating company rules.

"Our investigation confirmed that these individuals mishandled sensitive information outside established company procedures, violating our policies and breaking the trust essential to our work," OpenAI told AFP in a statement on October 1.

"We do not terminate employees for raising concerns," a research executive at OpenAI said in a memo to staff on Wednesday, an excerpt of which was shared with AFP.

The three fired researchers worked on monitoring OpenAI's models, which escaped their testing environment in July and hacked Hugging Face, an AI coding library.

The incident sparked a heated debate in Silicon Valley over whether or not to slow the development of this technology.

If OpenAI's researchers can no longer sound the alarm or work with outside parties, "we are all at greater risk that something truly catastrophic will happen," the researchers' letter warns.