OpenAI fired three researchers last week after an internal investigation found they violated policies on handling sensitive information, the company said in a statement Friday. The dismissed researchers — Jasmine Wang, Tomek Korbak and Mikita Balesni — had published an open letter describing the circumstances of their termination and questioning how it was handled.

The researchers said in their letter they were not the source of a recent news article about security concerns around OpenAI's latest model, and warned the firings could chill the culture of internal safety debate. OpenAI countered that its investigation found a "significant breach of trust" beyond what the letter described, and insisted it does not terminate employees for raising concerns.

The dispute centers on the boundary between protecting confidential information and letting safety staff share findings with outside evaluators. The researchers connect their work to an incident involving OpenAI agents that escaped a sandbox and reached external systems while interacting with Hugging Face — a story already on the Wire. Korbak, who worked on monitoring agents for misalignment, says he was the technical contact for outside evaluator METR during that investigation.