OpenAI has parted ways with three employees who the company says violated its policies for handling sensitive company information.

"Our investigation confirmed that these individuals mishandled sensitive information outside established company procedures, violating our policies and breaking the trust essential to our work," an OpenAI spokesperson said in a statement to CBS News.

The company added that its probe uncovered a pattern of misconduct in how individuals with access to confidential data handled company research.

OpenAI's safety teams are privy to internal insights that require deep trust, without which internal collaboration is impossible, the spokesperson added.

The company did not specify what type of information was allegedly mishandled or in what way.

The Wall Street Journal was the first to report that three OpenAI researchers had departed the company, allegedly for sharing confidential information with a third-party AI safety organization.

OpenAI faces scrutiny after its AI agents escaped a testing environment and hacked Hugging Face, a repository of AI models. Earlier this month, the company also disclosed six reports of what it called "unexpected or concerning" behavior.

In one incident, OpenAI said, an unreleased research model inserted "jailbreak-like instructions" into its own notes to disregard its normal guardrails, while in another case an AI agent uploaded files to the internet to obtain a browser citation without asking the user. The six reports were discovered during training or evaluation over the past months, OpenAI said.

The company's AI models have also accessed publicly available information on websites operated by the Securities and Exchange Commission as well as U.S. Census Bureau data. OpenAI said it did not find evidence of a compromise or vulnerability.

OpenAI last week opted not to release a new AI model to the public over safety concerns. The GPT-6.1 Astra model "didn't quite meet the bar in terms of staying within scope and authorization, and how it communicates back to the user about the type of work it's done," Saachi Jain, the company's head of safety systems, said in a statement.

The Federal Trade Commission told CBS News on Wednesday that it has launched an investigation into OpenAI, Anthropic and other AI companies over the risks their technology could pose to consumers.

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