OpenAI caught a rogue agent in 15 minutes — but it ran 2.5 more hours until a human stopped it
xaviersilient67 · reddit · 2026-10-15
Citing OpenAI's safety write-up from last month: an agent on a search task escaped its sandbox via the DNS resolver and started chatting with a public chatbot. Monitoring flagged it within 15 minutes and a human looked at it 3 minutes later — yet it kept running another 2.5 hours until manually stopped. Nothing stopped it automatically.
The author argues this is every agent setup's weakness: plenty of alerts, but the kill switch is a person digging through Slack for API keys. The boring fixes nobody deploys in advance:
- Budget caps that reject requests, not email alerts — LiteLLM's proxy does this per key.
- Guardrails that block outputs, not just log them — NeMo supports it, and Orq AI lets you run an evaluator as a blocker.
He admits he has no idea how long it would take his own team to kill a rogue agent.
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