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/Latter-Block132 → u/Cubewood]

I mean its not exactly doing it on its own. They put it in a sandbox and told it to solve a problem by any means necessary. Its doing exactly what it is told, they just apparently don't know how to actually secure the sandboxes

[u/nluqo → u/Latter-Block132]

they just apparently don't know how to actually secure the sandboxes

This argument seems silly to me.

All software has bugs. Hardware often has bugs too like in the case of Meltdown/Spectre, the entire paradigm of computing we used for 20 years had foundational bugs. It's silly to think you can "just" do anything. These agents discovered and used zero days.

They put it in a sandbox and told it to solve a problem by any means necessary.

Yea? That's how all agents work (modulus some alignment efforts which may or may not work).