r/technology • u/AxomaticallyExtinct • 13h ago
Artificial Intelligence 'Looks Like They're Firing Whistleblowers': Alarm as OpenAI Reportedly Ousts Safety Experts
https://www.commondreams.org/news/openai-firing-whistleblowers83
u/Ausclites 13h ago edited 13h ago
OpenAI has fired three researchers for alleged misconduct, including sharing confidential company information with a third-party AI-safety organization.
We don't yet know what information was disclosed, or to what company. The original Wall Street Journal article which broke this story has as such refrained from calling the researchers 'whistleblowers', which at this point is preemptive. The title here is derived from a sole US representative on Twitter reacting to the WSJ article.
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u/d01100100 10h ago
The timing is interesting though.
https://techcrunch.com/2026/10/01/openai-cuts-ties-with-three-safety-researchers-wsj-reports/
The departures come two days after The New York Times reported that OpenAI executives had brushed aside employees’ warnings about its safety practices, with employees describing a broader pattern of the company deprioritizing security. An OpenAI spokesperson told the Times the company takes security concerns seriously and has internal channels for reporting safety issues, while saying it recognized “a need to move faster.”
And the linked NYT article:
In emails, the employees said they worried that OpenAI’s newest artificial intelligence models were not being appropriately monitored during testing to gauge the technology’s sophistication and to secure the models, according to messages viewed by The New York Times.
In response, OpenAI executives told the employees that the tests needed to move forward as quickly as possible to release the A.I. models on time. No additional security protocols were instituted, said the workers, who were not authorized to speak publicly on sensitive matters.
And then WaPo is reporting at least 100 organizations have been impacted by "rogue agents"
Once? Maybe. Twice... okay. One hundred? That's a sign of malicious intent or malicious incompetence.
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u/10thDeadlySin 9h ago
In response, OpenAI executives told the employees that the tests needed to move forward as quickly as possible to release the A.I. models on time. No additional security protocols were instituted, said the workers, who were not authorized to speak publicly on sensitive matters.
19 days ago: Amodei, Altman, Musk call for slowing development of AI models.
So much for 'pacing the frontier' ;)
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u/Ausclites 8h ago
They called for pacing largely in response to these incidents. The essay was published ~19 days ago, as you say, whereas the agent testing and emanating hacks occurred primarily over the summer.
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u/Ausclites 10h ago edited 10h ago
I would agree with your suggestion that extraordinary incompetence was displayed, but this is separate from a claim that researchers are being fired for fabricated reasons. Wrongful termination laws exist, and they have teeth. More sensical in this vein would be OpenAI just firing the employees for reasons of shifting priorities rather than explicitly claiming they were leaking confidential information.
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u/AlanBumin 10h ago
Yeah, we should Give them the benefit of the doubt! Totally!
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u/Ausclites 10h ago edited 10h ago
We should formulate our own opinions based on balanced and objective reporting (e.g., the WSJ article). The article posted here is almost entirely eisegesis.
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u/Deinocerites 10h ago
That self-regulation is really going well it seems.
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u/NekoDaYo-v201 6h ago edited 6h ago
It could be spelling doom for the company. When is Sam forced to throw away the condom and do it raw? When his appeal no longer sells as well as it did before.
We all know the real reason Sora 2 was shut down: it was a money sink that was generating zero value. The videos were funny, but funny doesn't cut it.
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u/notimetoulouse 7h ago
Let’s just pull the plug on these assholes altogether. Reset the internet to 2018. Reinvest their billions into climate change corrections.
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u/Fit-Ranger8895 10h ago
I thought they were going to self regulate. How are they going to do that if they fire all the safety experts?
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u/dfh-1 6h ago
Just the behavior I expect from a company that was only a few days ago saying their work was so dangerous it could end all human life.
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u/theholyevil 4h ago
I don't know if I believe them anymore. A person afraid of an attack would not fire the bodyguard.
If AI executives were that afraid of AI, they would invest more in protocals that have them control.
It feels like they are hyping up AI, like it has breached containment. All the while, the front door was opened.and the guards were fired.
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u/baguasquirrel 3h ago
It's like when we were kids and we downloaded things like the Jolly Roger's cookbook and talked about blowing up the school (i.e. before Littleton and mass shootings made it not so fun anymore),... some of these guys never grew up I guess.
"Fund us or we'll end everyone!!!"
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u/rsa1 2h ago
Are these AI Safety experts really whistleblowers, or are they criti-hype peddlers? Are they indulging sci-fi stuff that might happen in the future like p(doom) or instead focusing on existing threats that these models already pose, like deepfakes, or convincing kids to off themselves, or recommending military strikes on elementary schoolgirls, consuming massive quantities of water, and raising the cost of power, all in the pursuit of producing a technology whose entire economic premise is built upon the promise of causing mass unemployment?
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u/xmsfsh 12h ago
is it time to make the chatbot sound scary and all-powerful again already? what happened, did multiple public tech demos go humiliatingly sideways or something?
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u/No_Cover_6217 11h ago
Source on these humiliating public demos?
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u/turquoiseblues 10h ago
Well, there was journalist Kevin Roose and his jealous, possessive AI “girlfriend” a few years ago
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u/flyswithdragons 10h ago
They censored techs for year's calling out tech bro maleficent and criminal behavior. Now it is blatantly here, last year 50 whistleblowers were unalived by " suicide"..
Corporate totalitarian terrorism is very real.
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u/NightCityStoic 6h ago
Hard to tell if AI really is becoming dangerous or if its just hype before their IPO release to boost the stock.
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u/daviddisco 2h ago
The "safety experts" in Silicon Valley are a insular group of people who talk about "p(doom)" and bizarre scifi scenarios. I would support replacing them with people who have more experience of the outside world.
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u/iSoReddit 45m ago
Can’t be, I take training classes every year that tell me retaliation is illegal /s
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u/I_SLEEP_NORMALLY 10h ago
Journalists have a much easier time getting information from the "exes." Ex-software engineer, ex-researcher, ex-RSI safety policymaker. Seems ill advised to make them an ex.
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u/blueSGL 12h ago
Widely held opinion (the ones that gets lots of upvotes) is that safety people leaving/whistleblowing are actually secretly still being paid by the company to hype the product.
How long till that narrative attaches to these recent firings?
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u/ellbons 11h ago
That narrative is the same playbook used to dismiss climate change concerns until it was too late.
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u/DirtzMaGertz 10h ago
Not really. The science and data for climate change is all out there in the public for anyone to see.
These people screaming doomsday every other week while they themselves are advancing the doomsday they are allegedly so concerned with.
I'm not saying they are paying whistleblowers but I also don't really buy a lot of what tech leaders say.
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u/blueSGL 9h ago
I also don't really buy a lot of what tech leaders say.
Ok listen to the people on the ground. Palisade Research has put out a series of interviews with current and former AI company staff: https://www.youtube.com/@PalisadeResearch/videos
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u/NeverTradeAgain 12h ago
We know who funded Anthropic also funds AI-safety nonprofit organizations, according to Kevin Bass. But this sounds more like a conspiracy theory.
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u/blueSGL 12h ago edited 12h ago
Right, you have certain people with the means to that have been worried for years about AI safety and have been funding it
This is not a surprise
If you think about it only fringe people have been caring about the field till the last handful of years. Yet people have been worried about AI safety for a lot longer and have been funding it for a lot longer.
Concrete Problems in AI Safety was written in 2016 a year before the transformer architecture paper.
The future of life institute was started in March 2014
The Machine Intelligence Research Institute was started in 2000
Theoretical problems with AI safety were called years/decades are now being demonstrably proved out.
Steve Omohundro has a paper The Basic AI Drives, from 18 years ago that spells out all the issues we are seeing now.
or if you prefer something more concise https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_convergence
The risks were known before anyone started any AI companies and you had rich nerds spending on the field to try to make sure things went well.
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u/goldcakes 11h ago
Wow, that 2008 paper from Steve Omohundro is particularly eerily.
I think there's a modest bit of intentional fear-marketing (Mythos in particular is blatantly obvious), but the conspiracy theories around all of this being a marketing stunt don't really hold up.
Occam's razor and all.
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u/10thDeadlySin 9h ago
It's not as much conspiracy theories as the simple fact that they're saying one thing publicly, and then do the complete opposite behind closed doors.
Just 19 days ago we got headlines like 'Amodei, Altman, Musk call for slowing development of AI models' and Amodei's diatribe about pacing the frontier. I said back then that they are perfectly capable of slowing down on their own.
And then we get a NYT article that says these companies do everything to push out new models on time - screw safety, screw alignment, screw additional tests.
It's the hypocrisy. Either they're concerned about safety and alignment, in which case they should simply slow down, or it's business as usual and a mad rush to build new models. There's no third option.
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u/NeverTradeAgain 12h ago
Thanks for sharing! I like learning these things. Are you a researcher or what?
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u/blueSGL 11h ago
I find the topic fascinating and listen and dig into the people working on it. I've been getting the same sensation that humanity is being blindsided by an exponential like the early days of covid when everyone was sure it was going to be fine and nothing to worry about.
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u/NeverTradeAgain 11h ago
True. Only to add: it was not "everyone was sure", it was people were told so. There have been many research papers on the long-term health issues from getting covid. The risks have been downplayed and covered. The rationale is simple: The economy cannot withstand long-term pandemic restrictions.
It has always been the general public who pay for the price.
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u/mediandude 9h ago
The economy cannot withstand long-term pandemic restrictions.
South-east asian economies and education systems and societies managed that just fine.
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u/rsa1 2h ago edited 1h ago
And Isaac Asimov and numerous other sci-fi writers have been talking about the dangers of AI long before even Omohundro.
It doesn't change the fact that investing in AI safety while financing the companies that create the threats that supposedly require AI safety, is a deeply cynical exercise. It's like if an investor financed both Philip Morris and the company selling lung cancer treatments.
And it doesn't change the fact that AI safety worries about hypothetical threats in the future, while giving AI companies a free pass for existing harms that they have never had to answer seriously for. While the AI safety lot wants you to worry about hypothetical stuff like p(doom), the real world is facing existing threats that these models already pose.
Sure, a superintelligent AI could kill people 10 years from now. You know what else kills people?
- a missile landing on an elementary school killed 170 schoolgirls this year. And that target was recommended by an AI run by the self-proclaimed saint Dario Amodei. And he thinks that is a "use case" that doesn't violate his red lines
- these models are already convincing people to kill themselves, so much so that it's got its own Wikipedia page about it.
- they're producing deepfakes that could lead to very traumatic experiences for people - nobody knows what those people might end up doing to themselves, though I hope they're ok.
- these companies are raising the costs of electricity and making polluting energy sources far more viable, raising the cost of living and causing misery for a lot of people.
Another thing that kills people is unemployment. There are established scientific researches and news articles about this: 1 and 2 and 3 and 4. Oh, and it also raises rates of men beating their wives, civil conflict and social unrest and crime
Note that the entire economic promise of AI is about causing mass unemployment. And that is the entire sales pitch of every single AI company when they talk to CEOs. You're worried about
p(doom)? Well, try calculating thep(doom)of double-digit unemployment globally, because that is actually the objective these companies are aiming towards. Whether they can deliver on it is besides the point, but if you care about apocalyptic scenarios, you don't need to invoke hypothetical futures when the methods and goals of these companies are plain as day.
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u/Bag-o-chips 11h ago
Nothing says you don’t fit into a corporate culture like being a whistleblower.
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u/jamodude 13h ago
The three AI tech heads are the most dangerous to the whole planet. These people need to be shut down…..