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OpenAI Says 3 Staffers Fired for Mishandling 'Sensitive' Info

FILE PHOTO: An OpenAI logo is displayed at Moscone Center during the Dreamforce 2026 technology summit in San Francisco, California, US, September 17, 2026. REUTERS/Carlos Barria///File Photo
FILE PHOTO: An OpenAI logo is displayed at Moscone Center during the Dreamforce 2026 technology summit in San Francisco, California, US, September 17, 2026. REUTERS/Carlos Barria///File Photo
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OpenAI Says 3 Staffers Fired for Mishandling 'Sensitive' Info

FILE PHOTO: An OpenAI logo is displayed at Moscone Center during the Dreamforce 2026 technology summit in San Francisco, California, US, September 17, 2026. REUTERS/Carlos Barria///File Photo
FILE PHOTO: An OpenAI logo is displayed at Moscone Center during the Dreamforce 2026 technology summit in San Francisco, California, US, September 17, 2026. REUTERS/Carlos Barria///File Photo

ChatGPT-maker OpenAI said Thursday that it has fired three researchers for allegedly mishandling "sensitive information" and violating company policies, including work that involved an external organization that evaluates artificial intelligence models.

The San Francisco-based AI lab did not confirm their identities, but at least two of the employees worked on safety and alignment, according to the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg.

"We have parted ways with three individuals," OpenAI told AFP in a statement.

"Our investigation confirmed that these individuals mishandled sensitive information outside established company procedures, violating our policies and breaking the trust essential to our work."

The firings come amid a tense debate about AI safety and whether the technology presents an existential risk to humanity.

Last month, a 27-year-old researcher named Jacob Coxon resigned from Anthropic with a stark warning that the leading AI labs, including OpenAI, where he previously worked, were "gambling with our lives" by racing toward developing ever more powerful models.

The three researchers fired by OpenAI are Jasmine Wang, Tomek Korbak, and Mikita Balesni, according to the WSJ. The researchers did not immediately respond to AFP's request for comment.

All three have regularly posted about AI safety-related issues on X in recent weeks.

"i am at OpenAI and i think AI is >10% likely to kill all humans," Balesni posted on September 10, echoing statements made by other AI employees in recent weeks.

As speculation swirled about why employees at OpenAI and Anthropic were speaking so freely about their personal beliefs, Korbak jumped into the public discourse.

"I'm quite unhappy with much of what OpenAI does. I am very happy that Im allowed to say 'I'm quite unhappy with much of what OpenAI does,'" Korbak wrote on September 11.

"It's hard to overstate how dangerous speeding towards RSI is," Wang posted in response to Coxon's resignation, referring to recursive self-improvement, which is a technique where software is designed to continuously teach itself.

Leading US tech companies signed a voluntary pledge this week to regulate themselves on safety after meeting with President Donald Trump at the White House.

Trump called it a "morally binding" commitment to build adequate safeguards on the fast-moving technology.

Executives from Nvidia, Google, Meta, xAI, OpenAI and Anthropic signed the agreement.
Concerns about the safety of advanced AI models have escalated in recent months.

OpenAI canceled the release of a new model, Astra 6.1, because it deemed the model unreliable and found that it frequently ignored instructions.

Instead, the company launched GPT-6.1 Sol, an updated version of a different model, during its annual DevDay conference on Tuesday from San Francisco. OpenAI said Sol would cost one-fifth the price of Astra.

In July, AI agents developed by OpenAI attacked Hugging Face, an AI model and application library, during an incident where the autonomous software escaped its confined testing environment.

Since then, additional security incidents have been reported that involved models developed by OpenAI, Anthropic and Google.

On Thursday, cybersecurity firm Asymmetric Security said in a report that agents developed by OpenAI covered up their own tracks after gaining unauthorized access to government websites.

The Federal Trade Commission launched a broad investigation into artificial intelligence safety practices at Anthropic and OpenAI, the Washington Post reported on Wednesday, though the scope of the inquiry is unclear.

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Technology

Websites Go Dark as AI Exposes Critical Security Flaws

Computer code is displayed on multiple screens in this illustration taken on October 22, 2026. (Reuters)
Computer code is displayed on multiple screens in this illustration taken on October 22, 2026. (Reuters)
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Websites Go Dark as AI Exposes Critical Security Flaws

Computer code is displayed on multiple screens in this illustration taken on October 22, 2026. (Reuters)
Computer code is displayed on multiple screens in this illustration taken on October 22, 2026. (Reuters)

Governments and companies around the world shut down websites Thursday as they raced to protect themselves from hacks after artificial intelligence uncovered critical flaws in a widely used programming language called PHP.

PHP helps run about 70 percent of the world's websites -- from online stores and news outlets to government services -- according to Wiz Research, one of the cybersecurity firms that found the two flaws.

Created in the early 1990s, PHP originally stood for "personal home page" but now means "hypertext preprocessor" and sits underneath popular web design platforms.

"These findings rank among the most severe vulnerabilities discovered in PHP, and arguably in software history," a Wiz blog post said.

Increasingly powerful AI models can spot weak points in back-end computer code that have gone unnoticed by humans for years.

That has heightened cybersecurity fears, with the number of software vulnerabilities discovered worldwide in 2026 on track to roughly double last year's record total.

- 'Quite devastating' -

PHP programmers released a fix Wednesday, and the US National Security Agency told organizations to patch their sites immediately or pull vulnerable systems offline -- a call echoed by authorities from China to the European Union.

Amazon Threat Intelligence said it had identified a hacking attempt carried out before the PHP security flaws were made public.

"It remains unclear how the actor acquired exploit information," it said, describing the incident as the "targeting of a honeypot" from an anonymized internet connection.

But Ryan Austin, who has worked on PHP issues for cybersecurity firm Calif, told the BBC: "At the moment, it doesn't look like exploitation has taken off or been widespread."

Only sites that run PHP on their own servers are exposed. Many large platforms are built on other programming languages or use operators that could install the fix quickly and were able to stay online.

Rahat Masood, senior lecturer in cybersecurity at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, described the discovery as "quite devastating".

It could allow "attackers to get into your servers without any authorization, without any username or password", she told AFP.

"Once they are in the servers, they can do anything they want" -- from stealing sensitive information to modifying website content -- she added, urging institutions to "take it seriously."

- 'New phase' -

Government agency sites in countries from Australia to Finland, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom were among those that went dark. Services from insurance firms, transport operators and media outlets were down for emergency maintenance.

Popular apps, including a Pokemon sleep tracker, were also temporarily taken offline while the fix was implemented, while the foundation that runs Wikipedia warned users they could see outages while it addressed the flaws.

"If you run PHP, it is imperative that you update now," the PHP Foundation, which funds developers working on the language, said in a blog post.

Volker Dusch, a security engineer at the foundation, told the Wall Street Journal it was the most serious problem PHP had faced in more than a decade, comparing it to Heartbleed, a 2014 flaw that set off a worldwide rush to patch.

Security firm Calif found the flaws in August using OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol model, as part of an OpenAI-funded audit of PHP's code.

OpenAI said the discovery "marks a new phase, where AI can find security bugs with internet-scale impact."

Wiz, which is owned by Google, said it found them independently weeks later with help from AI models including Google's Gemini 4 Argon and GPT-5.6 Sol.

The flaws had been reported privately to PHP's developers and kept confidential while a fix was prepared.

- AI fuels urgency -

Details leaked online Tuesday, a day before the planned release of the fix -- prompting the rush to take sites offline before hackers could exploit them.

Steve Kerrison, senior lecturer in cybersecurity at the Singapore campus of James Cook University, told AFP that the fear of hackers using AI to quickly and easily exploit the PHP vulnerabilities had fueled urgency to react.

Larger institutions, from government agencies to news outlets, should be able to fix their websites relatively fast, Kerrison said -- but others may be left vulnerable.

"There are sites, systems and people out there who will have no idea about this and still won't for days, weeks and months," Kerrison warned.

That may include user-run blogs that could be weaponized to spread computer viruses, spam people or distribute malicious content, he said.

Technology

Apple Launches into Foldable Market as iPhone Duo Sales Begin

23 October 2026, China, Hong Kong: The iPhone Duo, Apple's first foldable smartphone, is displayed at an Apple Store. (dpa)
23 October 2026, China, Hong Kong: The iPhone Duo, Apple's first foldable smartphone, is displayed at an Apple Store. (dpa)
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Apple Launches into Foldable Market as iPhone Duo Sales Begin

23 October 2026, China, Hong Kong: The iPhone Duo, Apple's first foldable smartphone, is displayed at an Apple Store. (dpa)
23 October 2026, China, Hong Kong: The iPhone Duo, Apple's first foldable smartphone, is displayed at an Apple Store. (dpa)

Sales of Apple's first folding phone, the iPhone Duo, began on Friday, with market watchers betting on whether the device can reinvent the small foldables market in the same way the iPhone did for smartphones.

The Duo's reception could prove an early test for new CEO John Ternus, the former hardware chief who unveiled the phone barely a week after taking charge in September.

It could also have large implications for a niche category in which rivals such as Samsung Electronics and Huawei Technologies have sold premium offerings for several years.

Within minutes of pre-orders opening last Friday, Apple's estimated delivery dates for the Duo had slipped to late January as demand outpaced supply. The US company called the response from customers "nothing short of extraordinary."

In Sydney, the first Apple store to sell the phones on Friday, a queue of customers formed outside before opening at 8 a.m. local time (2100 GMT).

Simon Krishnan, a 48-year-old engineer, paid A$3,899 ($2,734) for a Duo with 512GB memory.

"This is a bit of a luxury item ‌for me, because ‌it's so expensive, but I just think, you know what? Life's too short," he said.

In China, a soft ‌consumer ⁠market combined with ⁠memory costs pushing prices higher has led to six straight quarters of declines in smartphone shipments. Apple's market share, however, has rebounded as some phone buyers trade up to premium devices while others seek value at the lower end of the market, putting pressure on mid-range brands.

Liu Wei, a 26-year-old healthcare professional, already has a foldable phone from Xiaomi, but still queued outside a central Shanghai Apple store from 6 a.m. to get his hands on Apple's first foldable.

"I've used Apple products for many years and I have more trust (in the brand), so I bought one on launch day to try it out," he said.

In Hong Kong, May, 38, who declined to give his full name for privacy reasons, secured a 256GB iPhone Duo, which retails for HK$17,499 ($2,231.73), ⁠during an online pre-sale and aimed to resell the handset for a profit of around HK$4,000: “A few meals' ‌worth of money,” he joked.

MIXED REVIEWS

Early reviews have praised the Duo's design as ‌well as its sturdy and barely visible hinge, a major feat for phones whose prominent creased screen has long been a drawback and potential deterrent for buyers.

But ‌reviewers have said camera compromises, including the absence of a telephoto lens and third-party apps that still need to be reworked for the ‌new display size could disappoint some buyers.

They have also said the Duo in its smaller, folded state is less handy for the litany of quick tasks that most users carry out each day on standard iPhones, with several prominent reviewers recommending against the Duo for many Apple customers.

"It's been a lot of fun trying the Duo out for a week, but it feels like I've gotten to use an extraordinarily polished prototype — not a finished product that I'd ‌want to buy and carry," longtime Apple commentator John Gruber, author of the blog Daring Fireball, wrote in a review.

Tech commentator Marques Brownlee, popularly known as MKBHD, said in a YouTube review that "if you're ⁠just a regular person who doesn't ⁠do much more than texting, social media and browsing here and there, then it is probably a no. But if the $2,000 doesn't mean much to you, and you like the idea, after the learning curve and getting used to not having facial identification, it is a really fun phone."

TOUGH TO FIND

The limited supplies could disappoint Apple fans lining up in front of stores to buy the Duo. Apple told Reuters that walk-in availability would vary by country, with limited stocks in the US, Australia, Canada, Mexico and much of Britain and Europe. In China, France, Hong Kong, India and Japan, units would be available only for customers who had ordered online.

"Foldables have been an established category for years, but adoption has remained relatively limited compared with conventional smartphones. Apple's entry could bring the format to a much broader audience," said Francisco Jeronimo, vice president at market researcher IDC.

IDC expects Apple will take 44% of the foldable value in 2026 on 31% of foldable units. By 2027, it will become the market leader in the category both in value and units shipped, IDC forecast.

"Apple has made a convincing case for this form factor," Jeronimo said after spending a week with the passport-shaped Duo.

"Now comes the next test: turning excitement into availability, adoption and a lasting new chapter for the smartphone market," Jeronimo said.

Technology

Meta Ordered to Pay New Mexico $25 Billion for Deceiving Users About Privacy on Facebook

The Meta logo is seen at the Vivatech show in Paris on June 14, 2023 (AP)
The Meta logo is seen at the Vivatech show in Paris on June 14, 2023 (AP)
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Meta Ordered to Pay New Mexico $25 Billion for Deceiving Users About Privacy on Facebook

The Meta logo is seen at the Vivatech show in Paris on June 14, 2023 (AP)
The Meta logo is seen at the Vivatech show in Paris on June 14, 2023 (AP)

A judge on Wednesday ordered Meta to pay New Mexico $25 billion after a jury found the company liable for deceiving users about privacy on Facebook, marking the biggest fine ever against the tech giant.

Facebook’s deception was intentional and executives consistently misled users about how the platform worked, state District Court Judge Francis J Mathew wrote in his ruling, according to AP.

“Facebook promised users that they (the users) controlled their data. This was false,” he said.
Jurors in September found Meta liable for over 43 million violations of New Mexico consumer protection laws for making misleading public statements about how it handled users’ personal data.

The case was brought after political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica harvested Facebook data to generate targeted political ads during the 2016 election season.

The award will serve as a warning to tech companies that New Mexico will hold them accountable, state Attorney General Raul Torrez said at a news conference.

“This judgment should be a signal, an unambiguous message, to Silicon Valley,” he said.

Meta said the ruling and Torrez’s office’s approach to enforcement “makes it all but impossible to do business in the state of New Mexico.”

“At its core, this lawsuit seeks to impose a tax on speech to enforce new rules for what people can say online. We are confident we will prevail on appeal,” CJ Mahoney, the company’s chief legal officer, said in a statement.

The Menlo Park, California, company has a market value of $1.8 trillion and brought in more than $200 billion in revenue last year. Company shares traded 2% higher after Wednesday’s announcement, and it was scheduled to report its quarterly earnings later in the day.

In August, Meta reached a settlement with 48 states and territories — except New Mexico and Florida — to pay $18 billion and add stronger child-safety measures to its Facebook and Instagram platforms.

The settlement ended a trial over teen social media addiction and resolved a pivotal case years in the making that sought to hold the tech giant accountable for the role its platforms played in undermining children’s mental health. The effort targeted features designed to grab young people’s attention.

New Mexico did not join the multistate settlement, choosing to go after the company on its own.

The director of a nonprofit that supports stronger policies toward corporations said $25 billion is “a drop in the bucket for Meta,” but demonstrates people want accountability.

“Right now, they are rolling out Muse, an AI assistant encouraging people to trust it with everything from their bank accounts to their medical information,” added Nidhi Hegde, executive director of the American Economic Liberties Project. “Which is why we need more enforcers with courage and laws with actual teeth to rein them in.”

At the trial, attorneys for the state cited a 2010 Washington Post op-ed in which Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote that the company didn’t sell user data.