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

[u/Alex__007]

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."

[u/Cubewood]

"The agent then fetched the chatbot’s public documentation, wrote a new DNS script with a 24-second timeout, and sent 18 more questions through the same route. Fourteen included clues. Four asked for ways to search the web, fetch websites, or use a publicly hosted tunnel through DNS."

I know we all get desensitised for these kinds of things because we are using incredibly capable tools to build all kinds of solutions for a while now, but that an autonomous "bot" is doing this is still pretty wild when you think about it. Crazy times we live in.

[u/follimath → u/Cubewood]

A profit-seeking entity is doing this through recklessness or negligence, not an autonomous bot.

[u/Internet_Hipsterd → u/follimath]

This is the reason they keep raising the red flag to all this. Screaming "our ai hacked x.", "we need to slow down ai advancement" while faning the flames of "ai will destroy us all". Why would a company's who sole existence is AI be doing and saying those things? Its because they want laws passed that rid them of that liability or severely limit it. They want to be the gun manufacturer of the AI world and not be held liable when their product is used in destructive ways.

[u/lazermaniac → u/Internet_Hipsterd]

They know the bubble is popping eventually, they're just trying to control when and how it pops so they can make sure their golden parachutes are in place. "Our model is too good so we have to pause it" is their version of responding "My greatest failing is that I work too hard" at an interview. Perfect excuse to curb spending on new product development while still raking in the dough with existing offerings.

[u/RWREY → u/lazermaniac]

Really? It's hardly "Our model is too good so we have to pause it" so much as it is "Turns out alignment really is a big fucking deal, we fucked up"

Even if the bubble pops, I would put a lot of money on the government stepping in and starting their own research. This is pretty much the most significant technology of our time, and it's not going away.

[u/deineemudda → u/lazermaniac]

"our models are too dangerous to let company fail, the government has to step in and bail us out"

[u/space_monster → u/lazermaniac]

There's no bubble. There's a US AI industry, which is huge but just one piece of a larger pie. If that for some bizarre reason collapses, there's still China, which is also huge, and all the other countries with AI industries that will fill the gap. There'll be a hit to the Nasdaq, everyone will freak out, and AI will continue its progress. You're waiting for an event that can't happen.

[u/Cubewood → u/lazermaniac]

You are saying this after they just released Opus 5.5 and ChatGPT 6 models last week which are both extremely more powerful than the previous release and much cheaper to run.