OpenAI fired a top safety executive after she opposed the company’s decision to allow adult and sexual content in ChatGPT, The Wall Street Journal reports.
The executive, Ryan Beiermeister, was fired following a leave of absence in early January because she allegedly sexually discriminated against a male employee, OpenAI maintains — something that Beiermeister denies ever happened.
“The allegation that I discriminated against anyone is absolutely false,” she told the WSJ in a statement.
OpenAI, on the other hand, said “her departure was not related to any issue she raised while working at the company.”
Beiermeister was vice president of OpenAI’s product policy team, which develops rules and safeguards for how its products can be used. Before she was fired, she told colleagues that she was opposed to OpenAI’s plans to launch an “adult mode“ that would allow users to engage in sexually explicit conversations with the chatbot. In addition, Beiermeister also expressed that she believed OpenAI’s guardrails to prevent child exploitation content weren’t strong enough, including when it came to walling off adult content from teens, per the WSJ sources.
The drama comes amid widespread attention on how the humanlike and sycophantic responses of AI companions can cause a user to form unhealthy attachments to them. In some cases, the AIs can encourage severely delusional thinking in a phenomenon some experts are calling AI psychosis, which has led to numerous deaths, many of them teenagers. OpenAI admitted last October that half a million users were showing signs of psychosis in their conversations with ChatGPT every week, citing internal data.
And now for a pertinent detail in light of the allegations of Beiermeister discriminating against a man. According to the reporting, Beiermester started a peer-mentorship program for women at OpenAI in early 2025. The program, the WSJ described citing people familiar with the matter, “connected women from different parts of the company and helped them gather in small groups to discuss career strategies.”
You can read between the lines here. Mind you, this is coming during an administration that’s pressuring companies and its own agencies by crying foul about discrimination against white people and DEI initiatives. An administration, by the way, that OpenAI — as well as some of its top executives — is very cozy with.
Tech journalist Brian Merchant spells it out.
“Tech executives have finally amassed their ultimate, long dreamed-of power: to summarily fire anyone who speaks ill of their desire to have sex with robots,” he wrote.
More on AI: ChatGPT Users Are Crashing Out Because OpenAI Is Retiring the Model That Says “I Love You”
The post OpenAI Fires Top Safety Exec Who Opposed ChatGPT’s “Adult Mode” appeared first on Futurism.
