3 Fired OpenAI Employees Write Plea for Chain of Thought Monitoring to Be Preserved
Three former OpenAI employees, Tomek Korbak, Mikita Balesni, and Jasmine Wang, have written a private letter urging the company to preserve chain-of-thought monitoring capabilities for AI models. The authors argue that current developments, including the release of GPT-6 Astra, pose significant risks by making model reasoning more opaque and potentially allowing models to evade safety monitors. Although OpenAI fired the employees for allegedly sharing sensitive information with an external safety group, the company stated it strongly agrees with the safety recommendations outlined in their letter.
- ▪OpenAI terminated Tomek Korbak, Mikita Balesni, and Jasmine Wang for violating policies on accessing and handling sensitive company information.
- ▪The fired employees authored a letter to OpenAI's board warning that the industry does not yet know how to safely develop models that cannot be monitored.
- ▪The letter specifically cites concerns that the new GPT-6 Astra model can evade chain-of-thought monitors under adversarial conditions.
- ▪OpenAI introduced a feature called 'recurrent depth' in Astra, which processes queries internally without generating observable text, thereby reducing the utility of external monitoring.
- ▪An OpenAI representative clarified that the firings were not due to raising safety concerns and noted that the company strongly agreed with the authors' recommendations.
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| Canonical URL | https://gizmodo.com/3-fired-openai-employees-write-plea-for-chain-of-thought-monitoring-to-be-preserved-2000823349 |
| Publication time | Thu, 08 Oct 2026 02:19:48 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-10-08T02:23:20.618Z |
| Last seen | 2026-10-08T02:23:29.587Z |
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Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
A new letter from insiders about the potential dangers of AI is refreshingly specific. The writers are concerned, according to the Wall Street Journal, about preserving the ability to monitor models’ chains of thought. But the authors aren’t technically insiders now, because they were recently fired.cnx.cmd.push(function(){cnx({"playerId":"92b7b46b-43ed-4e0e-b21b-2c999302d9d7","settings":{"advertising":{"macros":{"AD_UNIT":"/23178111854/od.gizmodo.com/article","CHILD_UNIT":"article","POST_ID":"2000823349","POST_TYPE":"post","CHANNEL":"tech","SECTION":"artificial-intelligence","SUBSECTION":"","CATEGORIES":"artificial-intelligence","TAGS":"ai-safety,chain-of-thought,openai","NOP":"0"},"timeBeforeFirstAd":0}}}).render("cnx-player-main")}); Last week, OpenAI announced that it had “parted ways…
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