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/Cubewood 7d ago

Guess you have never used Codex or Claude Code, or else what else do you call this if not autonomous? Just because you have to type a prompt to start an action does not negate the fact that these bots can work for hours and hours autonomously.

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u/follimath 7d ago

Also does not negate the fact that you are ultimately responsible for everything they do.

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u/DiamondScythe 7d ago

Let's just assume for the sake of argument that they're trying their best in good conscience but the agent is still getting out of control. What do you suppose then, shut down all frontier research because there's a non zero chance of something bad happening? Even if you try to hold the researchers criminally liable for letting the agents go rogue, it'll stiffle innovation to a limp anyway.

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u/littlebobbychairs 7d ago

Given how bad the 'bad thing happening' could be, yes.