OpenAI has fired three workers for allegedly sharing “sensitive information” about the company’s artificial intelligence models.
The researchers reportedly provided confidential information to a third party organisation involved in AI safety.
“We have parted ways with three individuals,” OpenAI said in a statement.
“Our investigation confirmed that these individuals mishandled sensitive information outside established company procedures, violating our policies and breaking the trust essential to our work.”
The three workers were Jasmine Wang, Tomek Korbak and Mikita Balesni, according to the Wall Street Journal, who first reported the news.
All three had been posting about safety issues on social media in recent weeks after warnings from former Anthropic and OpenAI researcher Jacob Coxon about rogue AI went viral.
More than 100 organisations have been impacted by incidents involving OpenAI’s, according to a blog post by the ChatGPT maker earlier this week.
“I am at OpenAI and I think AI is >10% likely to kill all humans,” Mr Balesni wrote on X on 11 September.
“The risk estimate is based on many beliefs about the future that are too long to into in this medium (like AI capabilities timelines, difficulty of the alignment problem, probability of regulation and a successful coordinated showdown with China.”
On the same day, Mr Korbak posted: “I’m quite unhappy with much of what OpenAI does. I am very happy that I’m allowed to say ‘I’m quite unhappy with much of what OpenAI does’.”
Earlier this week, OpenAI announced that it was delaying the launch of its latest AI model after claiming it was too dangerous to be released to the public.
The firm’s head of safety systems, Saachi Jain, said the model showed “higher levels of deception” than its predecessors.
The decision came amid calls among AI researchers to slow down the development of frontier systems in order to allow safety measures to catch up.
OpenAI’s call to halt the roll-out was praised by AI safety experts, though some warned that greater regulation and oversight is needed so that the decision does not lie with the comapanies themselves.
“I think it’s great news that companies are willing to stop a release when safety tests fall short,” said Fazl Barez, lead of the Oxford Martin AI Governance Initiative at the University of Oxford.
“But we need a way to determine how these decisions were made, and such choices should not solely depend on the company’s voluntary process. We need independent oversight regarding these safety concerns.”
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