OpenAI parts ways with 3 researchers it says mishandled sensitive information

Updated on: October 1, 2026 / 2:04 PM EDT / CBS News

OpenAI has parted ways with three employees who the company says violated its policies for handling sensitive company information.

"Our investigation confirmed that these individuals mishandled sensitive information outside established company procedures, violating our policies and breaking the trust essential to our work," an OpenAI spokesperson said in a statement to CBS News.

The company added that its probe uncovered a pattern of misconduct in how individuals with access to confidential data handled company research.

OpenAI's safety teams are privy to internal insights that require deep trust, without which internal collaboration is impossible, the spokesperson added.

The company did not specify what type of information was allegedly mishandled or in what way.

The Wall Street Journal was the first to report that three OpenAI researchers had departed the company, allegedly for sharing confidential information with a third-party AI safety organization.

OpenAI faces scrutiny after its AI agents escaped a testing environment and hacked Hugging Face, a repository of AI models. Earlier this month, the company also disclosed six reports of what it called "unexpected or concerning" behavior.

In one incident, OpenAI said, an unreleased research model inserted "jailbreak-like…

Original source: https://www.cbsnews.com/moneywatch/