Fired OpenAI safety researchers urge board to preserve chain-of-thought monitoring

Tomek Korbak, Mikita Balesni and Jasmine Wang, the three researchers OpenAI fired last week over the handling of sensitive company information, have written to OpenAI's board and safety committees urging the company not to move forward with developments that further reduce the ability to monitor models' chains of thought, according to the Wall Street Journal. The warning comes as OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra system card says its models could evade chain-of-thought monitors under adversarial conditions. OpenAI said the firings were not about raising safety concerns and that it strongly agrees with the letter's recommendations.