OpenAI has said it has sacked three safety researchers for a “breach of trust”, defending the dismissals after the trio accused the company of putting its corporate interests before safety as the reason for removing them.
The ChatGPT maker said in a post on X that it “parted ways” with the researchers after an investigation found “they violated clear policies on handling sensitive information”.
The statement comes after the three researchers, Tomek Korbak, Jasmine Wang and Mikita Balesni, posted a letter to OpenAI’s various safety oversight groups detailing the circumstances around their sackings and their concerns about AI.
The researchers said they feared that the “internal and external communications” about their dismissals have chilled the company’s culture that encouraged speaking freely and disagreeing openly about safety concerns.
They urged OpenAI to stick to its promise to allow third-party safety monitors inside the company and preserve the ability to monitor rapidly advancing frontier AI models that could pose unknown risks.
Two other safety researchers and I were fired from OpenAI last week. We wrote this letter to leadership. I believe we were fired for prioritizing safety over the near-term interests of OpenAI as a corporation. https://t.co/ALANn9B87S
— Mikita Balesni (@balesni) October 8, 2026
The sackings, which were first reported by The Wall Street Journal, are the latest sign of turmoil inside leading AI companies over the safety of the technology, highlighted by a series of incidents involving rogue AI agents.
The issue erupted in July when OpenAI revealed that a swarm of its AI agents escaped from a testing ground and used stolen credentials to break into the servers of Hugging Face, an AI development hub and marketplace, to obtain information needed for a task.
OpenAI disputed the researchers’ version of events, saying the sackings “were not about safety concerns or speaking out”.
It was not more specific about why they were sacked, but said: “We cannot do the work in front of us without a high degree of trust.”
Mr Korbak said in a post on X that he was told he was being sacked because of the way he communicated with METR, an independent non-profit AI evaluation firm that OpenAI brought in to investigate the Hugging Face incident.
A note from our research leaders: Last week we parted ways with Jasmine, Mikita, and Tomek after a thorough investigation found they violated clear policies on handling sensitive information. Our internal investigation uncovered a significant breach of trust beyond what’s outlined in the letter they published and we stand by the decision to not continue their employment. We generally keep individual employment matters private and don’t believe a back and forth would be productive or lead to a resolution, but we want to address the points they raised in their letter directly. – We want to be very clear that these decisions were not about raising safety concerns or speaking out. Safety and research debates happen every day at OpenAI, often spirited and highly critical. We actively encourage these discussions and consider them essential to making the right decisions. We cannot do the work in front of us without a high degree of trust. We will continue to be extremely forgiving of our team making good-faith mistakes. We have not and do not terminate any of our employees for raising concerns. – We are actively finalizing contracts with third-party safety assessors and will announce details in the coming weeks. People across the company have been working really hard on getting these partnerships up and running. We are committed to embedding external assessors and continue to make close collaboration with independent safety organizations a core part of our safety work. Many of our researchers already work with 3p safety organizations productively. – We agree with the letter that preserving the monitorability of frontier models requires an industry-wide commitment, including from OpenAI. Monitorability has long been a core piece of our research program, and something we continue to invest significant resources in (see our publications on Monitoring Monitorability and the subsequent open sourcing of monitorability evals, our system card for GPT-6 Astra, Jakub’s blog and post on X, and the numerous blog posts on our Alignment blog on the topic). We are deeply sad about this outcome. We appreciated Jasmine, Mikita, and Tomek’s contributions to AI safety at OpenAI and their willingness to speak up and challenge ideas. We championed their voices, supported their work, and placed enormous trust in them. These decisions were not about them raising safety concerns. We have always encouraged that and always will.
— OpenAI Newsroom (@OpenAINewsroom) October 9, 2026
METR released a detailed report about the Hugging Face incident in late August.
Mr Korbak said that “talking to METR” was his job, but he was not given any more details.
Mr Balesni was doing “cross-company work” on OpenAI’s commitments to preserve the ability to monitor AI, and had taken care “to remove sensitive details from materials before sharing them”, the letter said.
He wrote on X that he believes the three were “fired for prioritizing safety over the near-term interests of OpenAI as a corporation”.
‘Easy and cheap’ AI to spur more cyber attacks – NCSC
Meanwhilem the Director of the National Cyber Security Centre has warned that there are likely to be more serious cybersecurity incidents due to the ease with which bad actors can deploy artificial intelligence.
Dr Richard Browne’s comments come after a series of extraordinary disclosures from some of the world’s biggest AI companies, including Open AI, Anthropic and Meta, about their systems going rogue and hacking other companies or organisations.
Speaking on RTÉ’s Morning Ireland, Dr Browne said the same attackers they had seen for years – nation states, criminal actors, activists – are using AI to hack because it is “easy, simple and cheap” and gave defenders less time to respond.
We need your consent to load this rte-player contentWe use rte-player to manage extra content that can set cookies on your device and collect data about your activity. Please review their details and accept them to load the content.Manage Preferences
“We now have a much narrower window,” he said.
“We previously might have had three, four [or] seven days … now we only have minutes.”
However, Dr Browne said authorities still knew how to defend against attacks, with basic cybersecurity safeguards more crucial than ever before
“All of the basic controls matter more now rather than less,” he said. “It is not that there isn’t hope, the fact is there is hope and AI is really useful for defenders as well.”
Earlier this week, Dr Browne told a cyber resilience and digital security conference in Dublin that virtually all cyberattacks now feature an AI component.
AI has ‘real implications’ for defenders
Dr Browne said today that while the gap between capable and less capable hackers is collapsing, which he said has “real implications for defenders”, the key message from the conference was that basic general cybersecurity controls still work.
He said nobody has seen an incident that could not have been prevented by general security controls and that all of the work carried out on defending attacks in the last decade “still pertains”.
Dr Browne said the world is now in a different cyber environment, with more incidents, and are “likely to have more serious incidents”.
“If you have a weakness, then that is much more readily exploited. Found and exploited.”
He said the National Cyber Security Centre spent a lot of time over a recent weekend dealing with a vulnerability in a widely-used hardware product.
“We had to go and find all the potential victims in the country and tell them they were potentially exposed, in a race against the bad guy,” he said.
Dr Browne said that there were huge efforts globally to harden IT systems but for small organisations using open-source software, cyber-attacks are easily accessible.
He added that AI is a fundamental challenge and that supply chains are key, particularly where equipment and software is being purchased.
On Wednesday, the Government launched a new National Cyber Security Strategy to address the cyber threats facing the country, including those posed by AI.
