Tomek Korbak is a Member of Technical Staff at OpenAI, where he works on monitoring LLM agents for misalignment. Previously, he worked on AI control and safety cases at the UK AI Security Institute and on honesty post-training at Anthropic. He earned a PhD at the University of Sussex focused on reinforcement learning from human feedback and studied cognitive science, philosophy, and physics at the University of Warsaw.
Tomek Korbak is a Member of Technical Staff at OpenAI, where he works on monitoring LLM agents for misalignment. Previously, he worked on AI control and safety cases at the UK AI Security Institute and on honesty post-training at Anthropic. He earned a PhD at the University of Sussex focused on reinforcement learning from human feedback and studied cognitive science, philosophy, and physics at the University of Warsaw.
Career
Tomek Korbak studied at University of Sussex (PhD) and University of Warsaw (Studies in cognitive science, philosophy, and physics).
Senior Research Scientist at UK AI Security Institute from 2024-05 to 2025-11Worked on AI control and safety cases for frontier models.Cosigns Received
Tomek helped us a lot with the responsible disclosure of stolen thoughts, which, if anything, helped protect OpenAI from further IP losses through distillation. I reached out to Tomek because I trust his judgment and know that he deeply cares about safety. Thats a huge loss for OpenAI and all monitorability efforts. Very sad and frustrating.
I can't really see a world where OpenAI's actions are justified here. It was Tomek's job to communicate with METR, who were being given significant, unprecedented access to do the HuggingFace report. The norms were not set. Even if he fucked up badly, just give him a stern warning and ban him from roles involving liasoning with third parties, he did lots of other valuable work, and there'd no longer be room for him to inappropriately leak as part of his job. IMO firing people over a good faith attempt to use their best judgement in a novel and uncertain situation is a sign of a highly unhealthy culture. Firing him will have a chilling effect on anyone else at OpenAI working with third parties, an odd choice when Sam announced they'd embed evaluators with high access. I separately consider this a tragedy, the METR report was one of the most important works of safety this year, punishing Tomek for being a part of it, and making it harder for future such reports to exist is a real shame. Of course, I've only heard Tomek's side, but unless he's outright lying I'm struggling to see ways this looks good for OpenAI?
Having worked with @tomekkorbak , he is immaculately professional, deeply thoughtful, and excellent at research I don't have any privileged information in this situation, but I felt the need to speak in support of him & his character
Huh?? @OpenAI, you owe the world a much better explanation of what happened here. Tomek, Mikita, and Jasmine say they did nothing wrong and are inviting you to share the details if that's incorrect. So - I'm waiting. What did they do to get fired?