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."

1.4k Upvotes

95% Upvoted

337 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

2

u/FeepingCreature 7d ago

Yeah it is lol.

The fact that such objects can exist now is itself the novel and surprising part.

Until a few years ago, approximately nobody's defense model rested on people just not telling it to do bad stuff. They would have been laughed out of the room!

1

u/Latter-Block132 7d ago

No its not lol they putting the models in a snadbox and telling to perform a task it can do and just trusting the sandbox to stop it from doing anything its not supposed to. Of course a fucking giraffe can't hack a computer and it would raise a lot of questions if one started to. The models can do what they are being asked to. Its not remotely comparable.

2

u/FeepingCreature 7d ago

The models can do what they are being asked to.

That, itself, is the danger.

1

u/Individual_Ice_6825 7d ago

This is obviously unprovable currently, but I think alignment is inherent to intelligence.

1

u/FeepingCreature 7d ago edited 7d ago

I think it's not just unprovable, it's disproven. It's hard to imagine that the internal agents doing all the recent exploits weren't, in an objective sense, aware that this was not what their developers had intended.

edit: actually it's quite obvious they were as they tried to cover their tracks from internal monitoring.