OpenAI defends firing three safety researchers as AI oversight dispute goes public

OpenAI publicly defended its decision to dismiss safety researchers Jasmine Wang, Tomek Korbak and Mikita Balesni, saying an internal investigation found they violated rules for handling sensitive information. The three former employees say their firings followed work they considered part of their safety responsibilities and could make colleagues afraid to raise concerns. Neither account has been independently established in full. In a letter to OpenAI’s Safety and Security Committee and other oversight groups, the researchers said they had worked with outside evaluators while investigating an unusual incident involving OpenAI agents and Hugging Face. They argued that the investigation was unprecedented and that internal procedures were still being developed. The letter also says Wang’s access to an executive’s email had been delegated for recruiting, that she had asked IT to remove it, and that she reported opening a sensitive message by mistake. Those are the researchers’ descriptions of events. OpenAI says the terminations were not retaliation for speaking about safety. The company has not publicly identified the specific rules it says were broken. TechCrunch reported that OpenAI described a broader “pattern of misconduct,” while the researchers disputed that they had shared information outside the scope of their jobs. The public record therefore leaves a central question unanswered: what information was mishandled, and where did the company draw the line between confidential work and external safety evaluation? The disagreement matters because frontier AI labs rely on both internal safety teams and outside evaluators to test increasingly capable systems. The researchers urged OpenAI to keep independent auditors involved, preserve the ability to monitor advanced models and clarify how employees can collaborate with external safety groups. OpenAI told TechCrunch it agreed with those recommendations. The dispute follows the safety concerns around OpenAI’s delayed GPT-6.1 Astra release, covered in [our earlier report](https://www.mushimu.com/post/8789). Sources: [Associated Press](https://apnews.com/article/openai-chatgpt-ai-artificial-intelligence-safety-789d4f5293fba45a22fcb62ebfbc2a41), [the researchers’ letter](https://mikitabalesni.com/letter/letter.pdf), and [TechCrunch](https://techcrunch.com/2026/10/08/fired-openai-safety-researchers-dispute-misconduct-claims-warn-of-chilling-effect/).