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Friday, Oct 23, 2026

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OpenAI Fired 3 Safety Researchers Over Disappearing Signal Chats With External Researcher

huggingnews.comIndustry4h

OpenAI fired three safety researchers—Tomek Korbak, Mikita Balesni, and Jasmine Wang—after security staff found disappearing messages on their personal Signal accounts. The firings followed a leak investigation into a story by The Information about OpenAI's Astra model and its use of opaque architectures. OpenAI suspected the researchers of sharing secret model designs with external expert Ryan Greenblatt, who denied facilitating any leaks.

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Key sources

  1. SOURCE@zeffmax“The three researchers OpenAI fired last month spent the summer fighting to keep AI's chain-of-thought process visible.”x.com
  2. SOURCE@keachhagey“asked them to unlock their personal phones... A week later, at 2 p.m., they were all fired.”x.com
  3. SOURCE@thezvi“The three researchers fired from OpenAI were told I facilitated architecture leaks to The Information. This is false.”x.com
  4. SUPPORT@balesni“OpenAI continues to not be able to say anything that makes sense to me about our firings and keeps acting adversarially”x.com
  5. SUPPORT@garrisonlovely“OpenAI then fired three safety researchers for having disappearing messages on Signal chats on their personal phone with Greenblatt.”x.com
  6. SUPPORT@_nathancalvin“I still don't really know what evidence OpenAI has that merited these firings.”x.com
  7. SUPPORT@apples_jimmy“The OpenAI spokeswoman said using signal wasn’t approved, but its use wasn’t the sole reason for the firings”x.com
  8. SUPPORT@so8res“they were just fired without warning after the fact.”x.com
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