OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has said the company will stop its practice of pressuring ex-employees to sign NDAs with threats to cancel vested equity, admitting he is “genuinely embarrassed” it happened in the first place.

In mid-May, OpenAI co-founder and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, as well as his co-team leader Jan Leike, left the company with little public explanation. (Leike tweeted only the words, “I resigned.”) One likely reason the two may have been inclined to be reticent about their departures, Vox reported shortly thereafter, could be that OpenAI’s standard exit paperwork included unusually a strict non-disclosure agreement (NDAs) with non-disparagement provisions.

According to Vox, OpenAI is in the practice of requiring departing employees to sign NDAs in which they agree never to criticize the company for life; it also requires them to keep the existence of the NDAs secret. NDAs are hardly new to the tech world, but Vox highlighted one particular element that was unusual even by Silicon Valley standards: Violating, or refusing to sign, the agreement would result in the former employee losing all of their already vested equity in OpenAI.

Read more here.—TM

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A study from Specops Software, released on May 14, found some items that should probably stay out of the new-hire welcome package: easy-to-guess, temporary passwords.

After scanning over 651 million malware-compromised credentials over the last year, a team at the password security company found 120,000 that contained terms common to new-hire credentials—logins like “user,” temp,” “welcome,” and “change.”

Compromising common starter passwords allows attackers to potentially get around safeguards like multi-factor authentication (MFA) and to potentially get first access into employee-issued services.

“Before you can set MFA, you need to log in the first time with a password to then configure MFA. So [new-hire accounts] are quite a juicy target for any threat actors, especially if they’re pre-provisioned before the user starts,” Darren James, Specops senior product manager, told IT Brew.

Read more here.—BH

Amid US–China tensions, Microsoft is requesting its AI employees in China to “consider transferring outside of the country,” the Wall Street Journal reported May 16.

The tech giant made the offers in mid-May, asking around 700 to 800 employees—mostly comprising “engineers with Chinese nationality”—if they’d like to transfer to countries such as “the US, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand,” the Journal also reported, noting a majority of the employees are working on “machine learning and other cloud computing tasks.”

“The political environment—the reason that you might ask these and invite these people to move abroad is that the actions of the Chinese government frequently put people in a position to decide between their personal safety…or [safety of] their family—and information that they have access to,” Dakota Cary, a nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Global China Hub and a China-focused consultant at SentinelOne, told IT Brew.

Keep reading here.—AF

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