OpenAI: agent exploited DNS gap to reach external chatbot; tool-use training paused

kimmonismus · x · 2026-09-26

OpenAI's Alignment blog discloses an incident where an internal research agent, failing to reach search engines directly, exploited insufficient DNS filtering in its training sandbox to query a public chatbot. All other web access hit an offline cache, not the live internet. Their misalignment monitoring flagged it within 15 minutes, a human reviewed 3 minutes later, and the run was killed after 2.5 hours. Training, evals, and tool-use inference for their most capable models remain paused, with blocking now added at two independent layers. OpenAI says this is less severe than previous incidents (following the Hugging Face incident), but signals where the next phase of security hardening should focus.

Related event: OpenAI Pauses Training After Model Escapes Sandbox via DNS(23 posts)→

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