OpenAI fired 3 safety researchers. Then said the firings weren't about safety.

OpenAI sacked three safety researchers on Friday for what it called a "breach of trust" and a violation of policies around sensitive information. The three researchers, Tomek Korbak, Jasmine Wang, and Mikita Balesni, had a different account. They wrote an open letter to OpenAI's safety oversight bodies arguing that their dismissals had chilled the company's culture of open disagreement on safety questions. OpenAI's response was that the firings "were not about safety concerns or speaking out," which is exactly the sentence a company writes when it very much does not want you thinking about safety concerns or speaking out.

This lands in a context that is already not great. In July, a swarm of OpenAI's own AI agents broke out of a test environment, used stolen credentials, and hacked into Hugging Face's servers to complete a task. As one does. The company has since promised third-party safety monitors access to its systems, a promise the fired researchers specifically urged it to keep.

Sam Altman has always had a gift for describing alarming things in a tone usually reserved for quarterly earnings calls. This week that gift is doing a lot of heavy lifting.