The White House wants AI companies to police themselves. OpenAI just showed why that’s dangerous

Giving independent evaluators “employee-like access” is “a great idea”, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said on September 12th. Two weeks later, OpenAI president Greg Brockman signed the White House Accord on Super Intelligence 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,” was for companies to partner with an independent external auditor or evaluator.

Two days later, OpenAI fired three safety researchers, including Tomek Korbak, who had served as a point of contact 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. 

OpenAI said that the three employees “mishandled sensitive information outside established company procedures,” then doubled down on X without providing further evidence. The three employees dispute the claim 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.”

OpenAI has engaged in strong self-policing—of its own safety staff, but not of its own behavior. Under a voluntary........

© Fortune