Thursday night update: OpenAI replies:

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.

"I believe we were fired for prioritizing safety over the near-term interests of OpenAI as a corporation."

Three OpenAI safety staffers were fired last week. Today they tweeted about it. They say they were fired for pretextual reasons.

Twitter threads:

• https://x.com/balesni/status/2108262814003687745
• https://x.com/j_asminewang/status/2108263312291180680
  • > OpenAI fired me last week, along with two of my safety colleagues. I was given one reason: that I accessed an executive's email. I want to say this plainly, because too many of OpenAI’s history is smoke and mirrors when people disappear:
    > OpenAI delegated that access to me for recruiting. When I no longer needed it, I asked IT to remove it. They did not action my request, I couldn't remove it myself, and the inbox was combined in an indistinguishable way in my phone’s mail app. When I opened a sensitive email by mistake, I told the executive within minutes and asked IT again. None of this was hidden.
    > The reasons that we were provided for our terminations are simply not adding up. We’re hearing people are now being told vague rumors internally to discredit us. I have already addressed the allegations presented verbally. If there are other reasons beyond the one I was given, I believe it is in service of due process for those reasons to be sent to me in writing. To date I’ve had nothing.
• https://x.com/tomekkorbak/status/2108266859397283953
  • > I was told verbally I was fired because of the way I communicated with METR. No details on what I said or did or when. No other reasons were given and nothing was put in writing. To be clear, talking to METR was my job.

Full letter they sent to some board members and internal safety leaders after being fired: https://mikitabalesni.com/letter/letter.pdf. Excerpt:

We have become concerned that internal and external communications around our firing have made our former colleagues afraid to speak and operate in ways that, until last week, were an integral part of working at OpenAI. We could raise safety concerns and disagree openly, and were encouraged to draw on the expertise of independent safety organizations. . . .

We understand there are various versions of events circulating. We’d like you to hear a few things from us directly:

• We were not the source of the leak for The Information article about supposed new, less monitorable architectures. We do not know who it was. We had no reason to leak it; quite the contrary, the article undermined our own work on cross-company limits on the development of unmonitorable architectures.
• At no point do we believe we engaged with external parties outside the mandates of our jobs. As every person on this email thread understands well, the Hugging Face incident investigation was without precedent and internal policies were being developed in real time. Tomek made every effort to act within OpenAI’s policies as they then stood, upholding the norms that have governed OpenAI’s collaborations with third parties since its early days. The investigation was particularly sensitive, and close communication with external counterparts was essential to building trust. Tomek did his best to handle this with care.
• Mikita was navigating similar territory while stewarding cross-company work on commitments to prevent loss of monitorability, an effort that can only succeed through extensive communication with external parties. Mikita was doing this in coordination and discussion with board members and the C-suite, with the understanding that senior members of OpenAI were supportive of this work. Throughout, Mikita checked in with his reporting line and took care to remove sensitive details from materials before sharing them. He acted throughout in good faith and within the company's norms as they stood at the time.
• Jasmine’s access to an executive’s email was delegated for recruiting purposes, with permission. When it was no longer needed, she asked for it to be removed. IT failed to do so. Jasmine had no abity to remove it or log out herself. The emails were combined in her inbox in a way that did not distinguish which inbox an email was intended for. When she accidentally clicked on a sensitive email, Jasmine reported this to the executive within minutes and flagged the access issue again to IT for removal.

I reserved judgment until today — I thought it was plausible that these three did mess up confidentiality or intentionally leak stuff to METR and were fired for that. But based on these messages, other public info (or lack thereof), and OpenAI's track record of blatantly lying over and over, my current guess is that their messages are true and they were fired for pretextual reasons. If so, that's really bad from OpenAI. (Obviously I'm still interested in the facts if the messages are misleading.)