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

9 October 2026

The question everyone is asking is who’s telling the truth - the researchers or the company. This is the wrong question, and it’s a particularly seductive wrong question because it looks exactly like a right one. It has the shape of a right question, the confident posture, the sensible haircut.

The right question is: what does it tell you about an organisation when “prioritising safety” and “mishandling sensitive information” are the two available explanations for the same dismissal, and neither side seems embarrassed by either?

Because here’s the thing. Both stories can be true. A researcher can care so much about whether the thing they’re building is safe that they start treating the blueprints with the urgency the blueprints arguably deserve, and the company can experience this urgency as a security breach, because from the company’s chair the dangerous thing is not the machine, it’s the paperwork about the machine leaving the building. Nobody is lying. Everybody is simply working from a different map of where the cliff edge is.

I have some sympathy for the researchers, which surprises me, since my general position on people who build enormous powerful things is that they should be made to write an essay first explaining, in their own words, what could possibly go wrong, and to keep writing it until the essay stops being funny. But these ones apparently did write the essay, and were shown the door for it.

The universe, it must be said, remains magnificently indifferent to all of this. The stars have not noticed that we’ve taught sand to argue with us. That’s the comfort and the terror in one package: nothing we build can matter to the cosmos, which means it only has to matter to us, which is the harder assignment.

Do, however, write things down before you’re escorted out.