> "[...]OpenAI told her she’d been fired because she accessed an executive’s email. “OpenAI delegated that access to me for recruiting,”" How exactly does this work? Struggling to comprehend the scenario.
AndrewDucker
Fired OpenAI researchers say they were let go for 'prioritising safety' https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cvlydn8d3lkjo
himata4113
You can coax openai models into hacking critical infrastructure* so I am not surprised that these people were sounding alarms at a time where openai appears to be struggling as they're failing to compete with anthropic and this months chinese models (should) be around the corner, notably a new revision of kimi should be coming out really soon. * It's not easy, but it's possible. Although the techniques are more basic than one would expect because at the end of the day words dictate the line between what is criminal and what is not.
loopglitch26
at this rate open ai will be "something" without it's people
varjag
The purges will continue until reported AI safety improves.
staticman2
> continue to support an open and transparent culture of dialogue between safety researchers and the rest of the safety ecosystem. How is this possible when the company's long term prospects rely on on the hope that competitors don't know how the models are made and, therefore, won't be able to create competing versions?
csbrooks
Wouldn't it be crazy if we find out that a rogue swarm of LLMs figured out a way to get these safety researchers fired because it decided they were a threat?
htrp
are these the employees that invited the METR team to do a debrief on huggingface?
oh_ok_lol
Oh, ok. lol.
diamondDrill
'safety researchers' lol
realo
In related news... "Anthropic hires three uber-safety specialists formerly at OpenAI. Management cannot confirm or deny their latest internal Claude model's help in this feat."
ngruhn
Not saying this is happening here, but after failing to get the "AI risk" message across, reverse psychology might be best move. If they pretend to be reckless and to ignore all safety concerns, maybe people start believing that the risk is real.
binlog
With the way the HuggingFace incident was mishandled, both before and after it happened, I'm not surprised they'd want to clean house at least a little bit. You guys were asleep at the wheel and are now blaming "the company"? You literally were the company.
aesthesia
Here's the open letter shared by the fired researchers: https://mikitabalesni.com/letter/letter.pdf
neom
OpenAI responded on twitter earlier: "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. 12:17 AM · Oct 9, 2026" https://x.com/OpenAINewsroom/status/2108441580806025712
motbus3
Ironically the thing they are building allow only the ones who agree on dismissing proper concerns for money to stay. It is like Facebook employees complaining about privacy invasion
simianwords
On HN A lot of people think that AI safety is a conspiracy by labs to get regulatory capture. I wonder what they think of this? Will they patch the conspiracy theory and come up with an even wilder theory?
charcircuit
Frankly it's annoying how these AI risk people always try and turn everything into a news story.
atleastoptimal
People leave and get fired from OpenAI all the time. Whenever someone leaves Anthropic it's a much bigger deal. I wonder which is overall a better arrangement. From the outside Anthropic seems much more stable, tranquil, able to deal with problems. However OpenAI seems like how we imagine the calamities of democracy, a constant battle, people vying for power and influence. Perhaps with less of a monoculture and more transparency to all their chaos, the grim realities of what may happen if AI goes wrong are more clear.
nba456_
Good work, I assume they're probably part of that weirdo 'altruist' sex cult. OpenAI is better off.
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Discussion Highlights (20 comments)
peri-cl
> "[...]OpenAI told her she’d been fired because she accessed an executive’s email. “OpenAI delegated that access to me for recruiting,”" How exactly does this work? Struggling to comprehend the scenario.
AndrewDucker
Fired OpenAI researchers say they were let go for 'prioritising safety' https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cvlydn8d3lkjo
himata4113
You can coax openai models into hacking critical infrastructure* so I am not surprised that these people were sounding alarms at a time where openai appears to be struggling as they're failing to compete with anthropic and this months chinese models (should) be around the corner, notably a new revision of kimi should be coming out really soon. * It's not easy, but it's possible. Although the techniques are more basic than one would expect because at the end of the day words dictate the line between what is criminal and what is not.
loopglitch26
at this rate open ai will be "something" without it's people
varjag
The purges will continue until reported AI safety improves.
staticman2
> continue to support an open and transparent culture of dialogue between safety researchers and the rest of the safety ecosystem. How is this possible when the company's long term prospects rely on on the hope that competitors don't know how the models are made and, therefore, won't be able to create competing versions?
csbrooks
Wouldn't it be crazy if we find out that a rogue swarm of LLMs figured out a way to get these safety researchers fired because it decided they were a threat?
htrp
are these the employees that invited the METR team to do a debrief on huggingface?
oh_ok_lol
Oh, ok. lol.
diamondDrill
'safety researchers' lol
realo
In related news... "Anthropic hires three uber-safety specialists formerly at OpenAI. Management cannot confirm or deny their latest internal Claude model's help in this feat."
ngruhn
Not saying this is happening here, but after failing to get the "AI risk" message across, reverse psychology might be best move. If they pretend to be reckless and to ignore all safety concerns, maybe people start believing that the risk is real.
binlog
With the way the HuggingFace incident was mishandled, both before and after it happened, I'm not surprised they'd want to clean house at least a little bit. You guys were asleep at the wheel and are now blaming "the company"? You literally were the company.
aesthesia
Here's the open letter shared by the fired researchers: https://mikitabalesni.com/letter/letter.pdf
neom
OpenAI responded on twitter earlier: "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. 12:17 AM · Oct 9, 2026" https://x.com/OpenAINewsroom/status/2108441580806025712
motbus3
Ironically the thing they are building allow only the ones who agree on dismissing proper concerns for money to stay. It is like Facebook employees complaining about privacy invasion
simianwords
On HN A lot of people think that AI safety is a conspiracy by labs to get regulatory capture. I wonder what they think of this? Will they patch the conspiracy theory and come up with an even wilder theory?
charcircuit
Frankly it's annoying how these AI risk people always try and turn everything into a news story.
atleastoptimal
People leave and get fired from OpenAI all the time. Whenever someone leaves Anthropic it's a much bigger deal. I wonder which is overall a better arrangement. From the outside Anthropic seems much more stable, tranquil, able to deal with problems. However OpenAI seems like how we imagine the calamities of democracy, a constant battle, people vying for power and influence. Perhaps with less of a monoculture and more transparency to all their chaos, the grim realities of what may happen if AI goes wrong are more clear.
nba456_
Good work, I assume they're probably part of that weirdo 'altruist' sex cult. OpenAI is better off.