WSJ: OpenAI fired 3 safety researchers over disappearing Signal chats on model Astra
rohanpaul_ai · x · 2026-10-23
Per the Wall Street Journal, OpenAI fired three safety researchers after security staff found disappearing Signal chats with an outside safety researcher.
- Trigger: a September report said OpenAI's newest model, Astra, uses a new method that makes it smarter but writes down less of its reasoning, reducing human visibility into how it reaches answers.
- Concern: future models thinking without writing steps down would let investigators see only what agents did, not why.
- OpenAI treated the report as a leak of secret model design, began hunting the source and started phone checks.
- Investigators named Ryan Greenblatt, who helped METR analyze logs from July's Hugging Face hack, as the suspected leaker; he denies it.
Related event: OpenAI Fired Three Safety Researchers Over Vanishing Signal Chats(8 posts)→
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