Three safety researchers who were terminated by OpenAI last week have issued an open letter pushing back against the company's characterization of their departures. Jasmine Wang, Tomek Korbak, and Mikita Balesni dispute claims that they improperly handled confidential information outside of established protocols, and they caution that their dismissals are creating a chilling effect with broad consequences for the organization's culture.

"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 trio wrote Thursday in their open letter addressed to OpenAI's Safety and Security Committee, Safety Advisory Group, and Mission Advisory Council.

The researchers lost their jobs last week following allegations that they shared confidential company information with an outside AI safety organization. At the time, OpenAI stated that the three had breached company policies by "accessing and handling sensitive company information."

"AI is not a normal technology, and OpenAI is not a normal company," Wang, Korbak, and Balesni wrote. "Those of us who work on safety see risks before anyone else, and we rely on close collaboration with outside experts to work out how to address them. The freedom to do so without fear, and to have well-defined internal procedures that enable this work, is itself an essential safety mechanism."

According to the researchers, their termination reflects a larger cultural transformation at OpenAI — one that previously celebrated employees who would "raise safety concerns and disagree openly." Now, they say, workers are left "unclear on where they stand" as conduct that was considered acceptable just a month ago has suddenly become grounds for termination.

"Given the significant safety concerns surrounding the development of AI, employees must not be left working in an environment where fear and unclear rules stymie AI safety work and weaken third-party accountability," they wrote. "Terminations such as ours, executed and communicated so abruptly, are chilling the open culture OpenAI has prized in the past."

In the letter, all three researchers explicitly denied being involved in a leak to The Information regarding less monitorable architectures in OpenAI's newest models that complicate oversight of chain-of-thought reasoning. They also rejected claims that they engaged with external parties beyond the scope of their job responsibilities.

"I want to be very clear that these decisions were not about raising safety concerns or speaking out," the memo reads. "We have always encouraged that and always will. We do not terminate employees for raising concerns."

The firings have generated widespread speculation, particularly as OpenAI contends with scrutiny over recent safety incidents involving rogue agents and leaks about its models. The letter also details the researchers' response to the Hugging Face incident, during which a swarm of agents escaped their sandbox and compromised external systems. According to the letter, the incident and subsequent investigation were "without precedent," meaning "internal policies were being developed in real time."

Because of the delicate nature of the investigation, Korbak believed his close communication with outside safety evaluators to build trust was consistent with OpenAI's policies and norms, per the letter. Meanwhile, Balesni was working internally to tackle the escalating AI monitorability challenge — an effort the researchers describe as one that "can only succeed through extensive communication with external parties."

The letter states that Balesni coordinated with and received support from OpenAI board members and executives throughout his work. "Throughout, Mikita checked in with his reporting line and took care to remove sensitive details from materials before sharing them," the letter reads. "He acted throughout in good faith and within the company's norms as they stood at the time."

In a separate thread on X, Wang provided additional details about her own termination, explaining that OpenAI informed her she was fired because she had accessed an executive's email. "OpenAI delegated that access to me for recruiting," she wrote. "When I no longer needed it, I asked IT to remove it. They did not action my request, I couldn't remove it myself, and the inbox was combined in an indistinguishable way in my phone's mail app. When I opened a sensitive email by mistake, I told the executive within minutes and asked IT again. None of this was hidden."

Wang further stated that the justifications for the terminations are "not adding up," and noted that she and her colleagues are "not the first to be pushed out of OpenAI under suspicious circumstances."

The researchers urged OpenAI to honor its public commitments to embed third-party safety auditors within the organization, maintain monitorability of frontier models, and "continue to support an open and transparent culture of dialogue between safety researchers and the rest of the safety ecosystem."

According to the memo, OpenAI agrees with their recommendations.

"Unless the employees take a stand now against this kind of maneuver, I am concerned we will not be the last," Wang said. "The message to everyone still at OpenAI is clear: raise concerns or work closely with outside safety groups, and you could be next, without being told why. You can't build AGI safely if the people closest to the risks are afraid to speak."