OpenAI Overhauls Safety Protocols After Its AI Agents Went Rogue

OpenAI announced Tuesday that it has halted “a significant number” of training workloads and evaluations for its forthcoming frontier artificial intelligence model—codenamed Astra—while it implements new procedures meant to address cybersecurity risks. The ChatGPT maker says it is introducing a number of new monitoring, security, and alignment requirements to better address the increasingly advanced hacking abilities of its frontier AI models.

“We have to focus our energy on bringing these training runs up to those requirements and expectations. As long as it takes to get there, that's how long people are unable to proceed with their workloads,” Amelia Glaese, OpenAI’s vice president of research and safety, said in a briefing with reporters Tuesday.

Among the new safeguards OpenAI announced is a more robust system for monitoring its AI models. One of the controls it implemented involves chain-of-thought monitoring, a technique in which classifiers review the internal “thinking” processes generated by AI reasoning models. The company says the updated system relies on computationally expensive “automated investigators” that analyze potentially concerning behavior and aim to issue an alert to humans within 30 minutes.