Why Was Leopold Aschenbrenner Fired From OpenAI?

Leopold Aschenbrenner says OpenAI told employees he was fired for leaking. The leak was a brainstorming document on preparedness that he shared with three external researchers for feedback.

He wrote it sometime last year, on safety and security measures needed in the future on the path to AGI. Sharing safety ideas with external researchers for feedback was totally normal at OpenAI at the time, and it happened all the time. The document was his own ideas. Before he shared it, he reviewed it for anything sensitive. The internal version had a reference to a future cluster, but he redacted that for the external copy. The document linked to his internal slides, but the link was dead for the external people he shared it with, and the slides were not shared with them.

The team no longer existed. After the November board events, OpenAI made personnel changes and both heads left. A 20% compute commitment, part of how a lot of people were recruited for an ambitious alignment effort, was not kept, and OpenAI decided to go in a different direction. Dwarkesh Patel said Leopold Aschenbrenner was the first person who left or was forced to leave.