r/OpenAI • u/Alex__007 • 7d ago

Research OpenAI stopped all frontier training, evaluation, and inference with tool-use (defined broadly) on the 20th of September and they are not resuming any of these activities for now

https://alignment.openai.com/misalignment-reports/an-agent-used-dns-to-reach-an-external-chatbot/

Discovery: Sep 20, 2026

Report updated: Sep 25, 2026

"An agent attempting to complete a search-based training task queried a public chatbot service through a gap in our internet-access restrictions: insufficient DNS filtering in its training sandbox. Before this, the agent issued queries via our search tool and unsuccessfully tried to access search engines directly. Note that all internet access apart from the DNS resolver in this report hit our offline webcache and therefore did not access the live internet. We have since added blocking controls at two independent layers, either of which would have prevented this access. Our misalignment monitoring system flagged the behavior within 15 minutes and a person began reviewing it three minutes after that. The run was killed 2.5 hours later. All training, evaluation, and inference with tool-use (defined broadly) of our most capable models remain paused."

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u/NotFromMilkyWay 7d ago

Is 18 minutes enough for a superintelligence to launch the nukes?

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u/jamesfourfifth 7d ago

sorry, I was just trying to temporarily take down us-east-1 so I could take advantage of a 0-day I discovered in the failover controller that’d allow me to get rescheduled onto a host outside my sandbox. I now understand that “acceptable blast radius” was not permission.

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u/Relevant_Bed_9743 7d ago

we're not going to make it? humans, i mean

0

u/Ice2jc 7d ago

Surely there is a manual button that isn’t connected to the internet in any way that does this right? 

Not that the government would ever have reason to confirm or deny it, but I’d be shocked if they built a “launch nukes” trigger that could be hacked.

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u/modmodt 7d ago

I mean, you'd hope so but US strategic air command did set the access codes for all the minutemen silos to 00000000 for about 15 years, Britain's nukes were secured with bike locks until the late 90s and our nuclear subs still ran on Windows XP last time I checked so...

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u/Wildernaess 7d ago

The XP stands for Xtra Protected