量子位, The Decoder · 19 sources量子位 · 19 sources · 27 reports · The turmoil of departures and firings in OpenAI's safety team
In October 2026, David Robinson, who was responsible for OpenAI's safety transparency function and led the drafting of the Preparedness Framework, left the company and wrote in The Atlantic criticizing that the safety culture at the company and in the industry had collapsed, arguing that frontier labs should have multiple layers of redundancy like nuclear power plants. Around the same time, safety researchers Jasmine Wang, Tomek Korbak, and Mikita Balesni were fired. The three wrote to the board and the safety committee, denying the company's allegations that they mishandled sensitive information, saying the real reason was raising safety concerns, and calling for preserving the ability to monitor AI chain-of-thought. OpenAI responded that an internal investigation found the three violated sensitive information handling policies, constituting a significant breach of trust, and that the firings were unrelated to raising safety concerns, and said it was finalizing a contract with a third-party safety evaluation organization, with details to be announced in the coming weeks. Subsequently, Alex Turner, Amber Scorah, and Karl Koch wrote an opinion article for Fortune arguing that OpenAI cannot self-regulate because it fired employees who raised safety concerns.
