https://mikitabalesni.com/letter/letter.pdf

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cvlydn8d3lkjo

"[...]OpenAI told her she’d been fired because she accessed an executive’s email. “OpenAI delegated that access to me for recruiting,”"

How exactly does this work? Struggling to comprehend the scenario.

"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. 12:17 AM · Oct 9, 2026"

https://x.com/OpenAINewsroom/status/2108441580806025712

continue to support an open and transparent culture of dialogue between safety researchers and the rest of the safety ecosystem.

How is this possible when the company's long term prospects rely on on the hope that competitors don't know how the models are made and, therefore, won't be able to create competing versions?

With hindsight we can all see what should have been done better. At least with nuclear power plants, there was a number of safeguards and it took a sequence of improbable events for things to go badly wrong. Given the lackadaisical approach to "AI safety", I suspect things will start going badly wrong very soon. Time will tell how bad this will get.

I wonder which is overall a better arrangement. From the outside Anthropic seems much more stable, tranquil, able to deal with problems. However OpenAI seems like how we imagine the calamities of democracy, a constant battle, people vying for power and influence. Perhaps with less of a monoculture and more transparency to all their chaos, the grim realities of what may happen if AI goes wrong are more clear.

You guys were asleep at the wheel and are now blaming "the company"? You literally were the company.

OpenAI needs to improve AI Safety --- OpenAI Employees have a responsibility to retain corporate secrets and do not have blanket freedom to share with 3rd parties.

Their job is twofold, they have to balance being an agent of the company they work for, with their role and responsibility for safety research.

This is the case for anyone in any company. You can "believe" that an external party needs access to something - that doesn't make it right, or allowed. As someone senior, you're expected to strike a smart balance, in-favor of the company you're working for. That doesn't mean hiding things, it does mean being thoughtful, ensure your leadership is comfortable with what you're planning to share/disclose, etc.

They work for OpenAI, not METR. It's a corporate vs academic mindset. They can believe METR needs x information to best research/audit something - that doesn't mean that is allowed/or the best option for OpenAI.

The question is whether these researchers exceeded clear, reasonable sharing boundaries or were penalized for carrying out expected safety collaboration.

sharing confidential company information with a third-party AI safety organization

This is a no-no regardless of anything. Confidentiality is not something you can just violate based on your personal beliefs. I don't condemn their actions here but this is just what happens when you get caught. I hope others will be smarter about how they do this in the future to hopefully avoid getting caught. If everyone at OpenAI gets caught then they are kinda screwed. "Chilling effect" being a bad thing here is wrong. You do need to avoid doing the things that get you caught.

@dang (not sure that's really a thing) any idea what's wrong with my comment on this thread?

"Anthropic hires three uber-safety specialists formerly at OpenAI. Management cannot confirm or deny their latest internal Claude model's help in this feat."

They said employees are now “unclear on where they stand” when behavior that was allegedly normal a month ago is now suddenly grounds for dismissal.

Unclear? Sounds 100% clear.

The monitorability of frontier models is degrading.

Is there more information about why this is happening? Is political pretext because it's what the labs actually secretly want, or is there a real underlying reason this is unavoidable?

I wonder what they think of this? Will they patch the conspiracy theory and come up with an even wilder theory?

And OpenAI does not care who they hurt in the process (as long as it's not themselves).

* It's not easy, but it's possible. Although the techniques are more basic than one would expect because at the end of the day words dictate the line between what is criminal and what is not.