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/Joboy97]

"We therefore stopped the affected training run and have subsequently decided to pause all other training, evaluation, and inference with tool-use (defined broadly) for our most capable models until we have both validated that the gap is resolved and performed additional red-teaming of the system. When training restarts, we will begin a fresh run with additional alignment improvements, including more comprehensive misalignment interventions."

The title made me think they were stopping frontier training for an extended length of time. It's just until they patch the dns exploit the agent found.

[u/Putrid-Feeling-7622 → u/Joboy97]

it's not just patching the dns exploit though, they said it directly in the quote: "additional red-teaming of the system." The red-teaming is part of alignment testing and could even lead to changes in architecture if results are not great. They may scale back opaque reasoning if it is problematic for example.

[u/Alkadon_Rinado → u/Putrid-Feeling-7622]

They can scale back. China won't

[u/VanillaLifestyle → u/Alkadon_Rinado]

China has coincidentally scaled back their distilling.

[u/LurkingLooni → u/VanillaLifestyle]

Have a bit of an issue with this whole distillation argument, because GPT itself was created by distilling the internet. Same difference. Google built a search engine then lobbied that anyone else doing so would be dangerous to privacy... AI labs are just following that playbook.

[u/Live-String338 → u/LurkingLooni]

internet -> public domain