WSJ: OpenAI fired 3 safety researchers after security staff found disappearing Signal chats with an outside safety researcher.

The phone checks started after a September news report said OpenAI’s newest model, Astra, uses a new method that makes it smarter but writes down less of its thinking, so humans can see less of how it reaches answers.
so the concern was, if future models think without writing those steps down, as the researchers feared Astra-style designs might, investigators would see only what the agents did, not why.

OpenAI treated that report as a leak of its secret model design and began hunting for the source.

Investigators named Ryan Greenblatt, who helped METR analyse logs from July’s Hugging Face hack, as the suspected leaker; he denies it.