They said company communications around the firing may have made colleagues 'afraid to speak.'

Three OpenAI safety researchers have posted an open letter to OpenAI disputing their dismissals. Jasmine Wang, Mikita Balesni and Tomek Korbak wrote that the "very public manner" of the company's communications around the firings could have a "chilling" effect on employees at a time when "the world's safety depends on them."

Last week, OpenAI dismissed three employees who allegedly shared information with an external AI safety organization. The company said in a statement that the employees "violat[ed] our policies on accessing and handling sensitive company information... breaking the trust essential to our work." In the face of recent serious and potentially illegal OpenAI agent hacks of Hugging Face and other organizations, though, the firing of safety employees raised awkward questions and caught the attention of lawmakers.

"We have become concerned that internal and external communications around our firing have
made our former colleagues afraid to speak and operate in ways that, until last week, were an
integral part of working at OpenAI," the joint letter from the dismissed employees states. "We could raise safety concerns and disagree openly [before], and were encouraged to draw on the expertise of independent safety organizations. This is part of what made OpenAI special, and why we are immensely proud to have been part of the team."

The researchers stated that they "acted in line with OpenAI's mission and within the working norms of the time," and that the firing "leaves us worried that the norms inside OpenAI are shifting and that employees are now unclear on where they stand."

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