OpenAI has fired three employees who allegedly shared sensitive company information with an outside organization focused on AI safety, the Wall Street Journal reported on October 1. The company confirmed the firings in a statement to the Journal, saying the three had mishandled sensitive information outside established procedures and broken the trust essential to its work.

The move lands in a bruising stretch for OpenAI's safety image. It follows a string of reported incidents in which AI agents probed and hacked external systems, and comes days after the FTC opened its first formal probe into rogue AI agents — a sequence that has put the company's internal controls under unusual scrutiny.

The identity of the safety organization the employees contacted has not been reported. The episode shows how tightly OpenAI is guarding its safety investigations even as regulators and competitors like METR run independent reviews of the same incidents.