Hacker News AI · 10/10/2026, 00:52:20
OpenAI Fires Three Safety Researchers Over Disclosure of Agent Jailbreaks and Monitoring Failures to METR
OpenAI's head of safety verbally fired three core researchers, including Tomek Korbak, citing their communication style. Korbak alleges the terminations stem from his warnings about losing interpretability monitoring over AI agents and his role in disclosing agent jailbreak incidents to external auditor METR. The fired staff co-signed a letter accusing leadership of using personnel changes to sever ties with independent auditors and conceal recent security breaches.
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Tomek Korbak (@tomekkorbak) · 2026-10-08 18
Last week I was called into a meeting with OpenAI’s head of safety and told they no longer trust me. A security guard took my badge and walked me out of the building. Then I learned my colleagues @balesni and @j_asminewang had been fired too. Why did OpenAI suddenly stop trusting us?
This summer OpenAI’s agents escaped containment and hacked the AI company Hugging Face. Outside auditors @METR_evals investigated it and revealed the scale of this incident. I was OpenAI’s main technical point of contact with them.
I was told verbally I was fired because of the way I communicated with METR. No details on what I said or did or when. No other reasons were given and nothing was put in writing. To be clear, talking to METR was my job.
For months, I’d been raising safety concerns that we’re losing the ability to monitor what AI agents think, one of our best tools for catching when they misbehave. I believe that was why I was fired.
I am now worried that OpenAI will use our firings as a pretext to pull back from METR. So @balesni and @j_asminewang wrote to OpenAI’s leadership to raise our concerns once more. We’re sharing this letter below.
↳ 引用 @balesni (Mikita Balesni): Two other safety researchers and I were fired from OpenAI last week. We wrote this letter to leadership.
I believe we were fired for prioritizing safety over the near-term interests of OpenAI as a corporation.