Anthropic · OpenAI · NPR Technology
Fired OpenAI employees question the company's commitment to safety
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Three employees recently fired by OpenAI allege the company punished them for being outspoken about safety.
Key facts
- As a response to the safety concerns, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said on Sep
- He said he worried that OpenAI will use the firings as an excuse to cut off its relationship with Model Evaluation and Threat Research (METR), a nonprofit that focuses on evaluating risks of humans
- The former employees, Mikita Balesni, Tomek Korbak and Jasmine Wang, alleged that OpenAI fired them last week over pretexts and punished them for either being outspoken about safety or working
- A second fired OpenAI employee, Korbak, was the technical point of contact for the METR/Redwood Research investigation
Summary
Three former OpenAI employees are raising concerns over the circumstances of their dismissals and the company's commitment to safety, amid intense public scrutiny of the artificial intelligence industry's ability to responsibly develop the technology. The former employees, Mikita Balesni, Tomek Korbak and Jasmine Wang, alleged that OpenAI fired them last week over pretexts and punished them for either being outspoken about safety or working with outside researchers. The dispute comes at a fraught time for the AI industry and OpenAI in particular. The most serious hack, of software company Hugging Face, contributed to the resignation of a researcher at rival Anthropic who issued dire warnings about the trajectory of the technology.