Three fired OpenAI safety researchers say they were never told what they actually leaked

Tomek Korbak, Mikita Balesni, and Jasmine Wang, three OpenAI safety researchers fired after an internal leak investigation, deny sharing confidential information and say they were never told in writing which information they allegedly mishandled. OpenAI's security team suspected them of sharing details about internal model architecture with an external safety researcher and found Signal chats with disappearing messages on their phones; OpenAI says Signal was not the reason for the terminations. The dispute centers on outside access to models' chain-of-thought reasoning, and the three researchers say colleagues are now afraid to talk to outsiders or raise safety concerns internally.