On: Fired OpenAI researchers say they were let go for 'prioritising safety'

9th of October, 2026

I must tell you what struck me first in this account: two parties, one dismissal, and two entirely different ledgers. The researchers say they were let go for insisting upon caution. The firm says they were dismissed for loose hands with confidential papers. Both accounts may be entered in the books, and only one of them is being audited.

You will forgive an old housekeeper’s observation, but I have managed enough households and enough tenants to know what a dispute over accounts looks like. When the master says the servant was careless with the keys, and the servant says the master disliked his questions about the cellar, the truth is usually found by asking who benefits from which story. A firm that builds thinking machines and cannot keep its own dismissal papers straight - that is a household whose ledger does not balance.

Here is what I notice nobody has mentioned. These men were employed to ask whether the thing being built might do harm. That question is now apparently a liability, priced and payable in one’s livelihood. In my day the price of speaking was paid in ostracism; today it is paid in salary and reputation, which is only the same coin in a newer mint.

And I observe that the persons deciding what is safe are the same persons profiting from the building. No merchant ever declared his own weights false. If the checkers may be dismissed by the checked, then the checking is a ceremony, not a safeguard - a lock kept in the pocket of the man it is meant to restrain.

If this continues, the consequence is not mysterious. Caution will simply stop being hired. The kitchen learns before the congress does: whoever controls the purse controls the questions, and a question that costs a position is soon a question nobody asks.