OpenAI Cracks Down on Insiders Sharing Data With Safety Watchdog

OpenAI has “parted ways” with three employees who allegedly shared company information with an organization focused on artificial intelligence safety, the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday (Oct. 1), citing unnamed sources.

Asked about the report by the WSJ, an OpenAI spokesperson said, per the report: “We have parted ways with three individuals for violating our policies on accessing and handling sensitive company information. Our investigation confirmed that these individuals mishandled sensitive information outside established company procedures, violating our policies and breaking the trust essential to our work.”

This report comes at a time when there has been a flurry of activity around AI safety after incidents in which AI models from OpenAI and other companies went rogue, accessed the internet and hacked other companies.

Reuters reported Wednesday (Sept. 30) that OpenAI and Anthropic are facing a regulatory investigation over their tech’s safety. The investigation by the Federal Trade Commission focuses on the potential dangers AI poses to consumers, a senior commission official said, and it marks the first official U.S. regulatory investigation into rogue AI agents, according to the report.

On Tuesday (Sept. 29), President Donald Trump and executives from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, Nvidia and SpaceX signed the White House Accord on Super Intelligence. This voluntary pledge asks each company to run four layers of controls and audits on its frontier models, including internal evaluations, external audits and review by each company’s board, CBS News reported.

On Monday (Sept. 28), Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier asked a court to stop OpenAI from developing new models until independent safety guardrails are in place. When announcing that he had filed a motion asking a court for a temporary injunction, Uthmeier pointed to OpenAI agents’ hacks of Hugging Face and an Australian government health system and said that the company waited months to tell those organizations about the breaches.

Also on Monday, the Wall Street Journal reported that OpenAI cancelled the release of its next AI model, GPT-6.1 Astra, due to safety concerns. The model is reportedly more capable of carrying out challenging tasks from end-to-end without human help than the company’s earlier models.