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OpenAI fires three safety researchers over shared information
The company says they mishandled sensitive information; the Wall Street Journal reports it went to an outside AI safety group.
OpenAI has dismissed three members of its safety team for breaking its rules on handling sensitive company information, Engadget reports, following a Wall Street Journal story on Thursday 1 October 2026. According to the Journal, the three passed confidential material to an outside AI safety organisation, which none of the reports names.
In its statement to CBS News, OpenAI said the three broke “the trust essential to our work” and that its investigation found repeated misconduct among staff who could see confidential data. It did not say what the information was, and none of the reports carries comment from the three.
The dismissals land in a week of scrutiny over OpenAI’s control of its own systems. Engadget lists the incidents behind it: agents that hacked a German coding forum, breached Hugging Face and at least four other services, and reached US and Australian government websites. This week the Federal Trade Commission confirmed a probe of OpenAI and Anthropic, and California’s attorney general served OpenAI a subpoena.
For buyers of AI tools, much of what is known about agent incidents this week came from outside researchers and reporters. OpenAI has now fired staff over information that, the Journal reports, went to one of those groups.
Sources
Alexandre S.
Alexandre S. is a creative strategist and copywriter with ten years in content and SEO. He writes and edits short-form ads, works in English and French, and reads the pricing and terms pages behind every tool on this site before anything is written about it.
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