❯ Three safety researchers fired by OpenAI write to the board, urging a halt to models whose reasoning is hard to monitor

A letter a week after the firingsThe Wall Street Journal reports that Jasmine Wang, Tomek Korbak and Mikita Balesni, three researchers fired by OpenAI on October 1, wrote to the company’s board on October 7 urging OpenAI and its peers to stop developing models whose reasoning is hard to monitor and audit, and to work with outside safety auditors. They say the firings are chilling those who remain at the company.

Two accountsOpenAI says an internal investigation found the three violated its policies on accessing and handling sensitive company information. According to Fortune, they are accused of sharing information with an outside AI safety organization that the company has not named; Bloomberg reported that some of it related to the architecture of OpenAI’s infrastructure. OpenAI denies the firings were connected to employees raising safety concerns.

The three say they stayed in boundsAs relayed by Hugging News, the three say in the letter that they never exceeded their professional duties: Korbak was the company’s technical contact for the evaluation group METR, and Balesni helped the board draft an industry safety pledge. Fortune also notes that US Congressman Greg Casar said it looks like the company is firing whistleblowers, while a legal scholar pointed out that California’s existing whistleblower protections typically do not cover disclosures to private third parties.

▮ SIGNALOutside evaluators learn about frontier models largely through people inside the labs who are willing to work with them, and when the boundary of that channel is drawn by dismissals, what suffers is the credibility of third-party evaluation as a whole.