The list of AI insiders sounding the alarm on their own companies keeps growing

Three OpenAI safety and alignment researchers were shown the door last week, reportedly for 'mishandling sensitive misinformation' — a phrase that sounds like it involves a shredder, a lanyard and a lawyer, and which OpenAI has not troubled itself to unpack. One of them, Tomek Korbak, posted online that the real offence was the way he had communicated information to METR, the independent evaluator that recently stepped out of the shadows to grade the very systems these three were paid to make safe. So the people whose job is finding what is wrong with the models told an outside body what is wrong with the models, and are now no longer employed by the people who make the models. Nothing to see here; the compliance page is updating.

The word 'misinformation' is doing heroic labour in that sentence. Not a lie, you understand — sensitive information, moved without the correct paperwork and the correct smirk. In any other industry, that is a leak; in AI, it is a dismissal dressed up as a hygiene issue. Bear in mind who got the boot: safety and alignment staff, the department that appears in the org chart and conspicuously not in the shipping timeline. Shrink the accountability function and the product gets faster, which is not a bug in the model so much as the business model.

And the headline, bless it, reports that the list of insiders sounding the alarm on their own companies keeps growing — a phrasing that treats an industrial pattern like a streaming queue with excellent retention. When one person says the plane is fine and a growing list says it isn't, the industry calls it a robust debate, regulators call it stakeholder input, and everyone else quietly checks the exits. The external evaluators, meanwhile, keep being handed more responsibility and precisely no more teeth, which is roughly how a carton of milk ended up better regulated than a frontier model. The bar for a crisis now sits somewhere below a Tuesday.