What happened?
According to a Wall Street Journal report by Maxwell Zeff, Keach Hagey and Berber Jin, OpenAI examined the phones of three safety researchers it fired last month and checked their Signal chats.
Tomek Korbak, one of the dismissed researchers, told the newspaper that he was told there had been a "breach of trust because I interacted with a third party through unsanctioned channels."
Why it matters
Signal is an end-to-end encrypted messaging app designed so that only the sender and recipient can read messages. Companies reviewing such chats on employee devices raises fresh questions about the line between corporate oversight and employee privacy.
The report could also intensify debate over how freely AI safety researchers can communicate internally and with outsiders. The source text does not include any further comment from OpenAI on the details.
