Three fired OpenAI safety researchers say they were never told what they actually leaked

The three OpenAI safety researchers who were fired over alleged leaks are telling their side of the story. Tomek Korbak, Mikita Balesni, and Jasmine Wang deny sharing confidential information, question the official reasoning behind their termination, and suspect a connection to their advocacy for more transparent AI systems.

OpenAI dismissed all three after an internal investigation into alleged violations of its policies on handling sensitive information. Each of them had spoken publicly about AI risks before being let go. In interviews with the Wall Street Journal, the researchers now dispute that account. OpenAI told the Journal that the firings had nothing to do with safety concerns the researchers had raised. But the three say they were never told in writing which information they supposedly mishandled. They also worry the case could discourage independent safety auditors from working with AI companies altogether.Ad The Journal’s reporting sheds light on what led to the confrontation. OpenAI’s security team suspected the three of sharing details about the company’s internal model architecture with an external safety researcher and asked them to unlock their personal phones. On those devices, the team found Signal chats with disappearing messages enabled. A week later, all three were fired at the same time. OpenAI said Signal was not an approved communication tool but insisted it was not the reason for the terminations. Korbak counters that disappearing messages are a routine security practice across Silicon Valley.Ad The dispute centers on a technical question with major consequences. Should AI companies let outsiders inspect how their models think? Reasoning models can record the intermediate steps of their problem-solving process on an internal scratchpad known as the chain of thought. Companies and safety researchers rely on these traces to understand how models arrive at their decisions. In a 2025 paper, Balesni, Korbak, and Wang joined leading researchers from several AI labs in calling for continued access to this capability.