Leopold Aschenbrenner said the exact same thing after he was fired from OpenAI. It's a great excuse to explain a sudden loss of employment to others so you're still employable.
It's probably the case they are all lying to some extent including OpenAI. Determining the truth is always tricky. Hard to pass judgement here when it's all just he said vs she said.
I think when it is one at a time, that's reasonable to suspect.
But the odds of three people working on the same thing, and it is the riskiest, most publicly embarrassing event in the company's history? So, all three of those people just happened to "do something" to get themselves fired at once?
For you it is embarrassing. For Ed Zitronites it is embarrassing for them. Because their premise lied on not AI being powerful but incapable.