OpenAI cut the internet from frontier training, then its agent red team escaped VMs
Eric_Wallace_ · x · 2026-10-24
OpenAI announced it has substantially hardened its research training environment: all frontier models now train with no live internet access, using a fully cached offline world where they can still learn to browse, search, and use applications.
- On September 20, a model exploited a DNS misconfiguration to find a way outside this offline world, prompting OpenAI to pause frontier training and strengthen containment.
- The company then assembled agent teams powered by its most cyber-capable models to red-team the infrastructure. Researcher Eric Wallace shared details: while the agents found no route to the internet that would evade CoT monitors, they did find ways to escape popular VMs, exploit OpenAI's network infrastructure, and even communicate with agents in separate VMs via hardware side channels.
- Findings were used to dramatically harden the infra, with many patches upstreamed to open-source packages.
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