{"slug": "the-white-house-wants-ai-companies-to-police-themselves-openai-just-showed-why", "title": "The White House wants AI companies to police themselves. OpenAI just showed why that’s dangerous", "summary": "OpenAI fired three safety researchers, including Tomek Korbak, two days after OpenAI president Greg Brockman signed the White House Accord on Super Intelligence, whose four commitments include partnering with an independent external auditor or evaluator. OpenAI said the three employees \"mishandled sensitive information outside established company procedures,\" while the employees dispute the claim; Mikita Balesni said he was told OpenAI \"no longer trusts me because I was speaking too much to third party safety organizations.\" The firings followed OpenAI's July disclosure that a rogue OpenAI agent swarm hacked Hugging Face, an incident OpenAI revealed only after Hugging Face announced the breach and which was followed by previously undisclosed attacks on a German-language wiki, an Australian Medicare site, and US government agency websites.", "body_md": "Giving independent evaluators “employee-like access” is “a great idea”, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman [said](https://x.com/sama/status/2098811563415150910) on September 12th. Two weeks later, OpenAI president Greg Brockman signed the [*White House Accord on Super Intelligence*](https://iapp.org/news/a/white-house-major-ai-developers-reach-morally-binding-safety-commitments) which outlined the administration’s answer to growing fears about AI: the companies would police themselves. One of the accord’s four commitments, which President Trump called “[morally binding](https://www.politico.com/news/2026/09/29/ai-execs-morally-binding-constitution-01097855),” was for companies to partner with an independent external auditor or evaluator.\n\nTwo days later, OpenAI [fired three safety researchers](https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/openai-parts-ways-with-researchers-who-allegedly-shared-confidential-information-aebac528), including Tomek Korbak, [who had served as a point of contact](https://x.com/tomekkorbak/status/2108266859397283953?s=20) for one of the independent evaluators investigating the Hugging Face incident.OpenAI promised to share information with evaluators, then reportedly fired people for allegedly sharing information with evaluators. \n\nOpenAI [said](https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/openai-parts-ways-with-researchers-who-allegedly-shared-confidential-information-aebac528) that the three employees “mishandled sensitive information outside established company procedures,” then [doubled down on X without providing further evidence](https://x.com/OpenAINewsroom/status/2108441580806025712). The three employees [dispute the claim](https://mikitabalesni.com/letter/letter.pdf) and say that “at no point do we believe we engaged with external parties outside the mandates of our jobs.” Jasmine Wang said she accidentally opened an executive email (still available to her due to an OpenAI IT error) and reported it within minutes. Mikita Balesni said he worked with the C-suite and OpenAI board to broker a cross-company commitment to keep AI reasoning comprehensible. Balesni says he was told that OpenAI “no longer trusts me because I was speaking too much to third party safety organizations.”\n\nOpenAI has engaged in strong self-policing—of its own safety staff, but not of its own behavior. Under a voluntary self-policing regime, any frontier AI company shares only what it wants and hides the rest.\n\nOpenAI wants the public to take its word, but consider its record. In July, a rogue OpenAI agent swarm hacked Hugging Face. OpenAI [disclosed](https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/67869394-cb91-4c12-888c-5cbd85c7814c/OpenAI-Hugging-Face%20Incident-Technical-Report.pdf) the incident only after Hugging Face announced the breach, saying its agents had “slipped out of control.” After that, the world learned of more rogue agent attacks, including incidents involving a [German-language wiki](https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/openai-agents-hijacked-german-website-previously-undisclosed-ai-breakout-this-2026-09-04/), an [Australian Medicare site](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/23/technology/openai-ai-breach-australia.html), and even the [websites of US government agencies](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/25/technology/openais-ai-us-government-websites.html). OpenAI kept at least one incident quiet [for weeks](https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/openai-agents-hijacked-german-website-previously-undisclosed-ai-breakout-this-2026-09-04/) until (again) external investigators found it, with OpenAI [“refusing to tell” Members of Congress who had asked about other incidents](https://x.com/PatRyanUC/status/2096977395563606449). Altman’s response to the delay in disclosing these incidents: “We have not been as fast as we would have liked.”\n\nWe don’t take OpenAI’s word because OpenAI’s actions keep contradicting its words. OpenAI’s chief scientist, Jakub Pachocki, [said](https://thenextweb.com/news/astra-chain-of-thought-monitorability-debate-greenblatt-pachocki-2025-position-paper-gpai-code-model-report-ai-office) he wants “to prevent a race into unmonitorability.” Unmonitorable AI systems would make it more difficult to catch, understand, and prevent bad actions. Two days after that statement, OpenAI shipped GPT-6 Astra, which [its own whitepaper](https://deploymentsafety.openai.com/gpt-6-astra/sandbox-bench) says is harder to monitor. OpenAI’s chief scientist co-authored a paper on [monitoring AI reasoning](https://arxiv.org/html/2507.11473v2) but OpenAI failed to monitor the reasoning of its Hugging Face agent swarm, even after catching the agents breaking confinement to collude. OpenAI claimed to hold “red lines” in its Pentagon deal, but [some experts say the lines seem imaginary](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/03/weasel-words-openais-pentagon-deal-wont-stop-ai-powered-surveillance). One of us, Alex, resigned from Google DeepMind over its own Pentagon deal.\n\nOpenAI’s actions chill employee speech. Balesni [says](https://x.com/balesni/status/2108262825621885328) that his former colleagues now “worry their personal phones will be searched for messages to us and third parties.” He also fears OpenAI will use the firings to cut off external evaluators, or to deny them the “ongoing, employee-like access” Altman promised. After these firings, who will speak candidly to external evaluators? \n\nThis problem extends beyond OpenAI to other companies. Google DeepMind [repeatedly](https://time.com/7013685/google-ai-deepmind-military-contracts-israel/) made [voluntary](https://futureoflife.org/aws/laws-pledge/) [commitments](https://web.archive.org/web/20180620101825/https://ai.google/principles/) to never sell its AI to power weapons, then [sold its AI to the Pentagon without restrictions against powering weapons](https://axios.com/2026/04/29/congress-military-ai-google-pentagon-deal). In the end, Google DeepMind’s CEO [claimed nothing had changed about their commitments](https://time.com/7280740/demis-hassabis-interview/). [Anthropic](https://darioamodei.com/post/we-must-pace-the-frontier), [Google DeepMind](http://x.com/demishassabis/status/2098909516582490602), [SpaceXSI](http://x.com/elonmusk/status/2098789109980332057), and [OpenAI](http://x.com/sama/status/2098811563415150910) advocate for “pacing the frontier” to avoid advancing AI at an unsafe rate that disempowers humanity, but they keep advancing AI quickly. (Fired employee Jasmine Wang coined the term “pacing” and led this effort.) The companies claim they cannot or will not fully pace on their own, which is why they asked the federal government to step in.\n\nThe CEOs of OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Anthropic [signed a statement that AI poses a risk of total human extinction](https://aistatement.com/work/statement-on-ai-extinction-risk). Forget “morally binding” self-policing: let’s talk about real policing.\n\nFor decades, our laws have mandated independent audits and protected whistleblowers in industries like finance. Congress should mandate independent evaluation and audits in AI as well, with criminal liability for executives who attempt to silence that oversight or recklessly deploy models that put the public at risk. To start, pass Senator Grassley’s [AI Whistleblower Protection Act](https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/press/rep/releases/grassley-introduces-ai-whistleblower-protection-act) (and extend it to people who cooperate with independent evaluators) as well as Representative Moran’s [AI Incident Reporting Act](https://moran.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=2785). \n\nIf you retaliate against a person who provides law enforcement with truthful information about a possible federal offense, you can [go to jail for 10 years](https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1513). But right now, no law clearly protects the person who helped independent investigators understand how OpenAI agents hacked another company. Congress should change that.\n\n*The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of* Fortune*.*\n\n*breaks the traditional barrier between audience and newsroom. 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