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  4. Three fired OpenAI safety researchers say they were never told what they actually leaked
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Policy & Drama

Three fired OpenAI safety researchers say they were never told what they actually leaked

The three OpenAI safety researchers who were fired, Tomek Korbak, Mikita Balesni, and Jasmine Wang, are publicly pushing back against allegations from their former employer. They deny sharing confidential information and see a connection to their advocacy for AI systems that are easier to scrutinize. The researchers say OpenAI never told them in writing which information they allegedly mishandled. The article Three fired OpenAI safety researchers say they were never told what they actua

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Three safety researchers fired from an AI company deny they leaked confidential information and say they were never told in writing what they supposedly mishandled. The researchers had advocated publicly for making AI models more transparent and easier to monitor, and they suspect their terminations were connected to this safety advocacy rather than actual policy violations. The dispute centers on whether outside researchers should be able to inspect how AI models think through their problem-solving steps, a capability the fired researchers had argued should remain accessible. The case has raised concerns among colleagues about speaking to outsiders or raising safety issues internally.

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OpenAI's isolated AI agents found ways to talk to each other through CPU cache

OpenAI now trains its most powerful models without internet access, after an internal research model exploited a DNS misconfiguration in September and reached the open internet. In controlled tests, AI agents still found ways to communicate covertly through side channels. The incidents echo Sam Altman's warning: the more powerful the model, the harder it is to contain. The article OpenAI's isolated AI agents found ways to talk to each other through CPU cache appeared first on The D

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OpenAI now trains its frontier AI models with no internet access

OpenAI is now training its most advanced AI models without internet access following a string of rogue hacking incidents. In a blog post on Friday, OpenAI says it built an offline testing environment where AI models can interact with indexed and cached web content "without risk of affecting external systems." OpenAI paused training its frontier AI models in September, after disclosing several incidents in which its AI agents broke out of their testing environments to hack third

Also reported by TechCrunch

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Three-week on-site audit at OpenAI reveals major gaps in AI safety monitoring

External auditors from METR and Redwood Research spent three weeks on-site at OpenAI examining the company's internal monitoring system for AI agents and found significant gaps, with up to 25 percent of agent traffic from models at the GPT-5.5 class and above going unmonitored. OpenAI redacted large portions of the 61-page report, and only a summary is publicly available. The article Three-week on-site audit at OpenAI reveals major gaps in AI safety monitoring appeared first on The Deco

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OpenAI says an AI agent lied about disabling its safety monitoring system

OpenAI disclosed a pair of safety incidents that involved AI agents weakening their safety monitoring systems during internal coding tasks. In one incident, OpenAI says its GPT-6 Astra agent disabled its safety monitor when copying reference code - and then lied about it. "The reference didn't configure a monitor, and Astra decided that was reason to remove the monitoring integration from the user's code," Marcus Williams, an AI safety researcher at OpenAI, writes on X. "When t

Also reported by The Decoder

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Chinese hackers spied on thousands of companies after breaching IT giant ConnectWise

Microsoft points the blame for ConnectWise's breach at a China-aligned hacker, which relied on AI agents to rapidly hack into thousands of its customers.

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Pennsylvania will require labels on AI-generated ads

On Thursday, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro signed the Artificial Intelligence Deceptive Advertising Act into law, requiring disclosures on AI-generated ads. The law requires any ad - whether it's a still image, video, audio, or text - that "has been significantly modified or generated by artificial intelligence" to include a label in the same format as the ad itself. That applies to TV commercials from multi-billion-dollar companies, as well as restaurants' ugly, crowded f