Nathan Calvin: OpenAI’s statement on the fired researchers risks chilling open safety collaboration

Some observations and reactions to this statement from OpenAI:

• From the fired employees public communications, they seem to not understand why they were fired (the reasons they were given prior to their departure don’t make sense).

• OpenAI says in this note that “We will continue to be extremely forgiving of our team making good-faith mistakes” which implies that the employees in question were not acting in good faith.

• I have previously commented that despite all my disagreements with OpenAI, I have genuinely admired their strong culture of staff speaking freely about their work and concerns. I am worried that the hazy circumstances around the firing of these employees risks jeopardizing that culture.

• OpenAI seems to be saying that employees who are acting in good faith need not be worried about having their activities, including around safety work, chilled. But the fired employees are adamant that their actions were taken “in line with OpenAI’s mission” and “within the working norms at the time.” If OpenAI believes those norms need to shift, then they can make that decision (or if they dispute the employees claims that their actions were within the norms at the time, they can say so). But it seems clear that unless much more clarity is being provided internally, employees may reasonably respond by drawing back and ceasing to engage in open dialogue and collaboration that a month ago was considered normal and good.

• To some degree the amount of interest that external folks like myself and the general public have in these firings is absurd. If United Airlines fired three members of their safety engineering team, it would not be that interesting or impact whether I felt confident boarding my flight, because I know that there are regulations and rules and norms that enable flight to be safe and reliable irrespective of the particular personnel. As @Miles_Brundage has said: “I don’t think, before getting on a flight, about whether Bill McFlyerson’s departure from Delta’s leadership is a red flag or not. Nor should I have to care about this.” But of course this is not the case for frontier AI development.

• But in the current environment where all of these interactions are ad hoc and voluntary, I am worried that this episode may result in drawing back from some of the transparency and collaborations that can help make AI go well. Jasmine was one of the strongest voices internal to OpenAI advocating for pacing. Tomek was the main technical point of contact between outside evaluators and OpenAI during the Hugging Face incident investigation. Their departures in and of itself harm those sorts of initiatives, but if uncertainty and fear after their departure also results a broader drawback of permissible collaboration, then that would be even more harmful and concerning.

Quoting @OpenAINewsroom: A note from our research leaders:

Last week we parted ways with Jasmine, Mikita, and Tomek after a thorough investigation found they violated clear policies on handling sensitive information. Our internal investigation uncovered a significant breach of trust beyond what’s outlined in the letter they published and we stand by the decision to not continue their employment. We generally keep individual employment matters private and don’t believe a back and forth would be productive or lead to a resolution, but we want to address the points they raised in their letter directly.

• We want to be very clear that these decisions were not about raising safety concerns or speaking out. Safety and research debates happen every day at OpenAI, often spirited and highly critical. We actively encourage these discussions and consider them essential to making the right decisions. We cannot do the work in front of us without a high degree of trust. We will continue to be extremely forgiving of our team making good-faith mistakes. We have not and do not terminate any of our employees for raising concerns.

• We are actively finalizing contracts with third-party safety assessors and will announce details in the coming weeks. People across the company have been working really hard on getting these partnerships up and running. We are committed to embedding external assessors and continue to make close collaboration with independent safety organizations a core part of our safety work. Many of our researchers already work with 3p safety organizations productively.

• We agree with the letter that preserving the monitorability of frontier models requires an industry-wide commitment, including from OpenAI. Monitorability has long been a core piece of our research program, and something we continue to invest significant resources in (see our publications on Monitoring Monitorability and the subsequent open sourcing of monitorability evals, our system card for GPT-6 Astra, Jakub’s blog and post on X, and the numerous blog posts on our Alignment blog on the topic).

We are deeply sad about this outcome. We appreciated Jasmine, Mikita, and Tomek’s contributions to AI safety at OpenAI and their willingness to speak up and challenge ideas. We championed their voices, supported their work, and placed enormous trust in them. These decisions were not about them raising safety concerns. We have always encouraged that and always will.