San Francisco (United States) (AFP) - OpenAI, developer of ChatGPT, said on Thursday that it fired three researchers for allegedly mishandling "sensitive information" and violating company policies.

First modification: 02/10/2026 - 14:42

The layoffs come amid a tense debate over the safety of AI and its potential risk to humanity.

The San Francisco-based company did not immediately confirm the identities of the laid-off employees, although at least two worked in security and alignment, according to the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg media.

"We have terminated our working relationship with three individuals," OpenAI told AFP.

"Our investigation confirmed that these three individuals mishandled sensitive information outside of established company procedures, violating our policies and breaking the trust essential to our work," he added.

The company cites several breaches, one of which concerns information provided to an external AI evaluation group, which it does not name.

The Wall Street Journal reported that all researchers shared on social media their deep concerns about the dangers of AI and supported calls to slow down the development of this technology.

One of them, Tomek Korbak, presented himself as one of the interlocutors of METR, the institute in charge of investigating the attack on the open source platform Hugging Face with OpenAI tools, in July.

The high-profile attack is part of a long series of revelations about the excesses of AI in the testing phase in Silicon Valley.

Another of the excluded researchers, Mikita Balesni, wrote on X on September 10: "I work at OpenAI and I think AI has more than a 10% chance of killing all humans."

Less than a month ago, a researcher who moved from OpenAI to Anthropic, Jacob Coxon, resigned after accusing both companies of "playing with our lives."

Korbak and the third fired researcher, Jasmine Wang, had come to her defense in X.

© 2026 AFP

The content you requested does not exist or is no longer available.