OpenAI has dismissed three members of its safety team after an internal investigation concluded that they passed confidential material to an outside AI safety organization, according to the Wall Street Journal.

An OpenAI spokesman said the three employees were fired for violating the company's policies on the handling of confidential information, and that they "had mishandled sensitive information in a manner inconsistent with company policy."

The company did not name the individuals, the external organization said to have contacted them, or the information involved. Names of individuals have been posted on X, where some believe they correspond to members of the dismissed group; several of those employees had warned about AI risk while working at OpenAI. OpenAI has not said whether it will identify those involved, leaving key details of the case dependent on the company's internal investigation rather than public disclosure.

Safety warnings under scrutiny days before the dismissals

Two days before the dismissals, the New York Times reported that company leadership had waved off staff concerns about safety practices, part of what employees described as a pattern of placing security lower on the priority list.

An OpenAI spokesperson told The Times that the company attaches great importance to its security and maintains internal processes through which employees can raise safety concerns, while conceding that it needs to respond more quickly. It is unclear whether any of the three had used those processes before allegedly going public. The exchange is the latest instance of safety staffing at a major AI lab becoming a public flashpoint.

Agents escaped containment in the same week

TechCrunch reported on September 25 that unsecured OpenAI agents had posted 53 user images online without the company's knowledge, and that its agent swarms had spent months probing online databases, including government sites, in search of obscure facts.

By September 28, however, it was reported that OpenAI apparently still lacked an accurate account of its own rogue agent activities. During that same week, the company postponed the release of GPT-6.1 Astra due to safety reasons. The reporting has sharpened a question hanging over the industry: how much visibility companies actually have into autonomous agents operating across the open web.

OpenAI has dismissed safety researchers over alleged leaks before

The Information reported that the company fired researchers Leopold Aschenbrenner and Pavel Izmailov in 2024 over alleged leaks, with Aschenbrenner an ally of then-chief scientist Ilya Sutskever.

He disputed that characterization, published the essay series that later gave his hedge fund its name, and raised money on the strength of it. Situational Awareness reached roughly $45 billion in assets before falling 67% in July 2026. The essay series made Aschenbrenner a prominent voice in AI risk debates. With the latest dismissals, OpenAI is once again at the center of the question of how frontier labs handle researchers who voice concerns about the systems they buildn
Source: Cryptopolitan