OpenAI's safety crisis keeps getting worse and the company keeps making it worse

OpenAI keeps botching the trust crisis around its rogue AI agents.

Back in May 2024, OpenAI's head of super AI safety Jan Leike torched his relationship with the company when he publicly slammed his former employer and left for Anthropic. Safety culture and processes were falling behind OpenAI's "shiny products," Leike said.

Since then, OpenAI hasn't caught a break, lurching from one incident to the next. The latest was the Hugging Face hack, which seemed to confirm every fear, validated critics, and, as we now know, went far beyond Hugging Face.

A researcher warned for months that oversight was slipping

The firing of three safety researchers tied to the incident has made things worse. In an open letter to OpenAI's Safety and Security Committee, Safety Advisory Group, and Mission Advisory Council, the three warn that their terminations are scaring the employees who remain.

The firings were abrupt and public, and they've spread fear across the team. "If conduct that was considered normal last month now constitutes grounds for sudden dismissal, everyone at OpenAI is left guessing where the line is," the letter reads.

Tomek Korbak, one of the three, described his firing on X. He was called into a meeting with the head of the safety department, where he was told OpenAI no longer trusted him. A security officer took his badge and walked him out of the building. He then learned that his colleagues Jasmine Wang and Mikita Balesni had also been fired.

Korbak and Balesni were both directly involved in the Hugging Face hack investigation. Korbak served as OpenAI's primary technical contact for METR, the external safety lab that examined the incident. Balesni worked in parallel on industry-wide commitments to AI model monitorability. Wang was apparently fired for a different reason: she had delegated access to an executive's email inbox for recruiting purposes, and IT never removed it despite her asking. When she accidentally opened a sensitive email, she reported it within minutes.