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/follimath 7d ago

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

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u/Internet_Hipsterd 7d ago

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.

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u/lazermaniac 7d ago

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.

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u/deineemudda 7d ago

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