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Whistleblowers have accused OpenAI of placing illegal restrictions on how employees can communicate with government regulators, according to a letter obtained by The Washington Post.
Lawyers representing anonymous whistleblowers sent the letter to Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Gary Gensler. The letter refers to a separate, formal complaint asking the SEC to investigate OpenAI’s severance, non-disparagement, and non-disclosure agreements.
“The agreements prohibited and discouraged both employees and investors from communicating with the SEC concerning securities violations, forced employees to waive their rights to whistleblower incentives and compensation, and required employees to notify the company of communication with government regulators,” the letter says.
The letter says the SEC has been provided with evidence that “OpenAI’s prior NDAs violated the law by requiring its employees to sign illegally restrictive contracts to obtain employment, severance payments, and other financial consideration.”
OpenAI did not immediately respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment. A company spokesperson told The Post that OpenAI’s whistleblower policy “protects employees’ rights to make protected disclosures.”
A spokesperson for Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) confirmed to TechCrunch that The Post obtained a copy of the letter from Senator Grassley’s office. (Copies were sent to Congress.)
“Monitoring and mitigating the threats posed by AI is a part of Congress’s constitutional responsibility to protect our national security, and whistleblowers will be essential to that task,” Grassley said in a statement. “OpenAI’s policies and practices appear to cast a chilling effect on whistleblowers’ right to speak up and receive due compensation for their protected disclosures.”
He added that if the federal government is going to stay “one step ahead of artificial intelligence, OpenAI’s nondisclosure agreements must change.”
OpenAI’s employee exit agreement was already criticized earlier this year over provisions that would reportedly have stripped former employees of their vested equity if they refused to sign the document or violated their NDAs. CEO Sam Altman subsequently said he was “very sorry,” while also claiming the company had “never clawed anything back” and was “already in the process of fixing the standard exit paperwork.”
