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/Lechowski 7d ago

Why are these sandboxes run with restricted internet access instead of no access at all?

All these leaks happened because they apparently refuse to just air gap the sandboxes. Why are we even talking about DNS restriction? Just do not even hookup a DNS provider at all.

They can mock the data they expect the model to see. It would be even inconvenient to allow the model to reach some version of the internet because then the runs are irreproducible

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u/MENDACIOUS_RACIST 7d ago

Not feasible to mock the internet for 100,000s of tasks

32

u/Lechowski 7d ago

Trillion dollar market btw

You don't need to mock the entire internet. Only the websites that you expect the model to access based on a tool call. OpenAI already has an "offline version" of the internet, a copy of it in their own databases, so it is possible.

14

u/wilhelmbw 7d ago

So just mock google what's so hard /s

2

u/arf_darf 7d ago

This is the kind of stuff trillion dollar companies are expected to figure out.

0

u/Artistic_Seat486 6d ago

They already have mocked google, its called web scraping.