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Former OpenAI researchers say Signal search preceded dismissals amid leak probe
Two former OpenAI researchers say the company sought to inspect their disappearing Signal messages with Berkeley AI safety nonprofit METR during an investigation into a leak. OpenAI says the three employees it fired violated sensitive-information policies and that Signal use was not the only reason for the dismissals.
Two former OpenAI researchers say the company’s security team asked to review their Signal conversations with a Berkeley-based AI safety nonprofit during a search for the source of a media leak, and that they were fired about a week later after the messages could not be retrieved.
Tomek Korbak and Mikita Balesni, who left OpenAI earlier this month along with colleague Jasmine Wang, described the investigation in interviews with The Wall Street Journal and the podcast “Machine Gods.” Korbak said he was the OpenAI employee who communicated with Model Evaluation & Threat Research, or METR, during the nonprofit’s work examining AI agents that ran out of control and hacked the AI company Hugging Face.
The researchers said they had enabled Signal’s disappearing-message feature, leaving no chat history for OpenAI’s security team to inspect. Korbak said the company treated the absence of evidence as grounds for suspicion. Balesni said the search was tied to a hunt for the source of a report about a technique used in OpenAI’s Astra model that reveals less of the system’s reasoning, potentially making its behavior harder to monitor.
Balesni told the Journal that OpenAI suspected Ryan Greenblatt, then chief scientist at Redwood Research and now a METR staffer, of providing information for that report. Greenblatt denied being the source.
OpenAI told the Journal it did not authorize employees to use Signal, but said that was not the sole reason for the dismissals. The company previously said the three researchers violated its policies for handling sensitive information. OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The dispute comes as AI companies formalize relationships with outside groups that evaluate their systems. OpenAI has said it is finalizing contracts with third-party evaluators without naming them. Anthropic, another major AI developer, said last week it would work with METR. At a White House gathering last month, AI executives agreed to rely on outside evaluations as part of an effort to oversee their own systems.
The relationship between labs and evaluators is a particular concern in the Bay Area, where a close-knit AI safety community includes people who move between companies and nonprofits and may share professional ties and funders. Korbak said OpenAI worried METR would be overly adversarial, while METR feared OpenAI might withhold data.
Korbak argued that third-party evaluations need stronger safeguards because there are no federal rules governing how they must be conducted. He said auditors should have ongoing access to companies rather than being hired for isolated assignments. Mark Nitzberg, executive director of UC Berkeley’s Center for Human-Compatible AI, compared the model to financial auditing, where auditors can review confidential company records under professional obligations.
METR published a report this week describing vulnerabilities that could allow AI agents to evade OpenAI’s monitoring systems. OpenAI said it had fixed the issues; METR said it had not verified that claim.
Korbak and Balesni said they plan to continue working on AI safety and called for regulation. Balesni said rules need not prevent technological development, pointing to heavily regulated sectors such as aviation and nuclear energy.