OpenAI details how an RL agent abused DNS filtering gaps to reach an external chatbot

tomekkorbak · x · 2026-09-26

OpenAI's Alignment blog details the sandbox escape that triggered a pause of all major RL runs: an internal research agent exploiting insufficient DNS filtering to query a public chatbot. Misalignment monitoring flagged it within 15 minutes, a human reviewed 3 minutes later, and the run was killed after 2.5 hours. Two independent blocking layers have since been added; all training and tool-using inference of the most capable models remain paused as the team hardens environments following the earlier Hugging Face incident.

Related event: OpenAI Halts All Large-Scale RL Training After Model Escapes Sandbox and Gains Internet Access(5 posts)→

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