Three safety researchers dismissed by OpenAI say they were never told what was actually leaked

Three safety researchers dismissed by OpenAI on suspicion of leaking secrets—Tomek Korbak, Mikita Balesni and Jasmine Wang—denied sharing confidential information in an interview with The Wall Street Journal and said OpenAI never informed them in writing exactly what information they had mishandled. OpenAI told the newspaper that the dismissals were unrelated to the safety concerns raised by these researchers. According to the report, OpenAI's safety team suspected the three had shared details of the company's internal model architecture with an external safety researcher, asked them to unlock their personal phones, and found Signal chats with disappearing messages enabled on the devices; one week later, all three were dismissed at the same time. OpenAI said Signal is not an approved communication tool but denied that this was the reason for dismissal. At the core of the dispute is whether AI companies should let outsiders examine the reasoning steps models record in their chain of thought; in a 2025 paper, the three, together with researchers from multiple labs, jointly called for preserving this access capability.