Three people working on Alignment and Safety at OpenAI have resigned in a row: Is AI safety really becoming a roadside distraction? Mikita Balesni, a former researcher at Apollo Research, has done quite a bit of notable work in safety. His most famous contribution is the collaboration with OpenAI’s Mark Chen, Turing Award winner Yoshua Bengio, DeepMind co-founder Shane Legg, and Anthropic’s legendary researcher Ethan Perez on monitoring large model reasoning chains: *Chain of Thought Monitorability: A New and Fragile Opportunity for AI Safety.* He joined OpenAI in December 2025, but left after just 10 months. Tomek Korbak was part of the safety systems team. He studied cognitive science, philosophy, and physics in Warsaw, did his PhD at Sussex on RLHF, worked on model honesty at Anthropic, and contributed to AI control at the UK’s AISI. He joined OpenAI a month earlier than Mikita, in November 2025, focusing on safety measures for agents, including whether reasoning chains can still be monitored. He and Mikita were co-first authors of the reasoning chain paper, and neither of them had joined OpenAI when they wrote it. Jasmine Wang was the RPM (Research Project Manager) for the Alignment team, not a researcher. She previously led the AI control team at the UK’s AISI and earlier founded and sold an LLM company (the name wasn’t mentioned, so we won’t speculate). On December 1, 2025, OpenAI’s Alignment research blog post was published under her account.