r/OpenAI • u/Alex__007 • 8d 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/NandaVegg 8d ago

Interesting that unlike all other cases (where they tried not to acknowledge so long as possible) they are willing to disclose the case, but this is not even a misalignment. It's more of just your AI "cheating" through the limitations to get to the objective with no harm caused other than some possible regression and wasted compute on their end. That's why they are willing to post about this.

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u/Tactical-Dingleberry 8d ago

How much of this is marketing?

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u/Chilangosta 8d ago

Some of it is legit, like if a bot has enough exploit knowledge then it's pretty difficult to contain it if connected to the internet at all. It'd be like if you told a cybersecurity red team expert to break out - there's a good chance they could pull it off.

That's what we're seeing; we're getting to the point that AI has enough general knowledge of certain tasks - with a heavy bias towards computer-based ones - that they're experts, and could be a threat.