Three firings and a fourth departure shake up OpenAI's safety team

OpenAI has parted ways with three researchers who allegedly leaked confidential information to an outside AI safety organization, according to the Wall Street Journal. The paper identifies them as Jasmine Wang, Tomek Korbak, and Mikita Balesni.

Korbak worked on the safety team, while Wang and Balesni worked on alignment. An OpenAI spokesperson said an investigation confirmed violations of the company's rules for handling sensitive company information. OpenAI didn't confirm the names. It's unclear what information went to which organization.

Korbak was OpenAI's technical point of contact for METR and Redwood Research. Both groups were tasked with investigating how OpenAI's AI agents got around security controls and broke into outside systems like Hugging Face. The Wall Street Journal doesn't draw a connection between that work and the firings.

According to an anonymous X account, a fourth safety researcher, David Robinson, left OpenAI shortly afterward. All four had spoken out publicly about AI risks in September. Korbak wrote that he's unhappy with a lot of what OpenAI is doing. Balesni puts the odds that AI kills all humans at more than ten percent. Wang signed a petition calling for slower AI development. Robinson agreed with the claim that the race toward self-improving AI might be insane.

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