Controversy swirls over ‘abrupt’ firing of OpenAI safety team members involved in the Hugging Face hack investigation

A debate is playing out on social media, and inside the walls of OpenAI, about why the company fired three individuals last week on its safety team.

Now, the former employees, as well as OpenAI, have issued additional statements to clarify their sides of the story.

Two of the fired researchers—Tomek Korbak and Mikita Balesni—worked on OpenAI’s investigation of the Hugging Face incident.

Korbak was the technical point of contact for METR, the third-party research firm that OpenAI asked to conduct an independent audit of the incident.

The third dismissed employee, Jasmine Wang, was a program manager on OpenAI’s safety team.

The Wall Street Journal first reported the dismissals on Oct.

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At that time, OpenAI said the “individuals mishandled sensitive information outside established company procedures, violating our policies and breaking the trust essential to our work.” Fired employees publish a letter responding to the allegations Since then, there appears to have been continued conversation and controversy among the ranks at OpenAI, prompting the three former employees to co-author a four-page letter , published on Oct.

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The letter responds to “various versions of events circulating” among OpenAI staffers, and refers to ongoing “internal and external communications” about the firing that the former employees say is making current employees “afraid to speak” up.

“Terminations such as ours, executed and communicated so abruptly, are chilling the open culture OpenAI has prized in the past,” the letter says.

“It is that culture we are writing to defend.” The two biggest themes in the letter are about OpenAI’s ability to monitor its advanced models, and about its engagement with third party safety companies, such as METR.

The former employees deny they leaked concerns about the ability to monitor OpenAI’s latest Astra model to The Information , which published a Sept.

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