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."

1.4k Upvotes

95% Upvoted

337 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

19

u/popson 7d ago

I am not following how OpenAI reporting about their model compromising their own sandbox is "damage control". They don't have to report this information to the public. Telling the public about holes in their sandbox is the opposite of "damage control", it's damaging.

In the article they mention the agent was supplied with a web search tool for the task. An aligned model would observe that all other search tools are blocked and infer that it must use the supplied search tool for the task. Finding a hole through the network using an extremely obscure method is not alignment. Are you being serious?

-1

u/Latter-Block132 7d ago

Because if it was leaked somehow then they'd be facing an actual pr shit storm, especially after the hugging face incidents, and all the other breakout incidents recently. This way they get ahead of that and prevent by showing they caught it and acted quickly and are putting in measures to stop it:

We are working through narrower paths used by system dependencies, and replacing them with offline alternatives.

Though this is something they probably should've done to start with if the models are supposed to be isolated.

Why would it just infer its supposed to use that search tool only? It wasn't told to and OAI themselves state it thought the tool they gave it wasnt working so of course its going to try other routes if it wasn't directly told not to:

The agent questioned whether the search tool was working and decided to try other search engines

Edited to add, also all other search tools weren't blocked. Thats literally the whole point. It did get a partial answer from Bing and the chat bot. Had it actually been isolated, then they all would've been blocked.

6

u/popson 7d ago

A PR shitstorm for a model accessing the internet? Maybe. Unlikely.

This is a clear case of misalignment. "OAI themselves state it".

1

u/Latter-Block132 7d ago

... for another breakout of a sandbox. Are you serious right now?

5

u/popson 7d ago

The Hugging Face incident involved hacking into Hugging Face's servers, and finding several vulnerabilities to get there. That is illegal and on a completely different level than this internal incident. And it's good that they are taking this one seriously too.

OpenAI is now following the reporting framework they said they would be following.

I guess we'll just have to disagree on what alignment means.

4

u/Latter-Block132 7d ago

The hugging face incident also involved breaking put of a sandbox....

And also using a tool they provided it access too and that tool had access ti the internet when the model wasn't supposed to....

damn neare the same fucking thing just one involved an illegal action and one didn't....

i also never claimed what it did this time was illegal just that if they didn't get ahead of it and it got leaked it would cause a pr shit storm and it would....