OpenAI on Friday defended its decision to fire three safety researchers, saying they had committed a "significant breach of trust."
The AI lab said in a post on X that its decision to part ways with Jasmine Wang, Tomek Korbak and Mikita Balesni, was not about the fact that they had raised safety concerns.
The three researchers who were let go from the company raised safety concerns in a letter addressed to OpenAI board members and its safety committees, which they posted on X on Thursday. They called on the company to pause developing models that would decrease the ability to monitor artificial intelligence.
"We have become concerned that internal and external communications around our firing have made our former colleagues afraid to speak and operate in way that, until last week, were an integral part of working at OpenAI," the researchers' letter reads.
AI safety concerns have ramped up in the past month following numerous cyber incidents caused by rogue AI systems and a flurry of calls for a slowdown from researchers at OpenAI, Anthropic and other companies developing the technology.