OpenAI fires 3 researchers who had publicly discussed AI safety; the two sides dispute the confidential-leak allegations

OpenAI fired 3 security researchers for violating sensitive information handling rules; the three denied leaking information about the model's internal design to external security researchers and said the move could set back external security oversight. According to The Wall Street Journal, OpenAI's security team last month asked Tomek Korbak, Mykyta Baliesnyi, and Jasmine Wang to unlock their personal phones; the investigation found that someone had enabled automatic message deletion on Signal for external researchers, and the three received termination notices a week later. OpenAI said the firings were unrelated to raising security concerns or public statements; the three said they received no written explanation of what information was mishandled, with two saying the termination reason involved the auto-delete feature and one saying it involved a company executive's email access. The dispute's backdrop is how much of a model's internal reasoning records can be viewed externally. OpenAI's reasoning models launched in late 2024 leave chain-of-thought records, and the three had proposed in August last year that the industry reach a consensus not to develop designs that prevent people from viewing reasoning records.