Tomek Korbak: OpenAI fired me due to the way I communicated with METR

Former OpenAI employee Tomek Korbak posted on X that last week he was called in to meet with OpenAI's head of security, who stated that they no longer trusted him. Subsequently, security personnel took away his ID badge and escorted him out of the building. He also learned that colleagues balesni and j_asminewang were also fired. Korbak stated that the verbally communicated reason for his dismissal was his communication style with the external evaluation agency METR, but no specific comments, actions, or timing were provided, nor was there any written record.

Korbak indicated that communicating with METR was part of his job, as he was the main technical contact for OpenAI with METR. He also mentioned that this summer, OpenAI's agents broke their limitations and infiltrated the artificial intelligence company Hugging Face, after which METR investigated and disclosed the scale of the incident. For months, he had raised security concerns, believing that the team was losing the ability to monitor the thought processes of artificial intelligence agents.

Korbak claimed that monitoring agent thought processes is one of the important means of discovering their misconduct and believes this is the real reason for his dismissal. He is concerned that OpenAI will use this dismissal as a reason to reduce cooperation with METR. Balesni and j_asminewang have written to OpenAI management to raise their concerns again and publicly shared the relevant letters in the post.