OpenAI’s Models Went Rogue. Investigating Them Required More AI

But a key takeaway of the report, according to one of its authors, had nothing to do with what they found. Instead, it was about the difficulty of carrying out the post-mortem in the first place—and the fact the researchers had little choice but to rely on AI for assistance. 

“I semi-jokingly called our efforts a ‘slop-vestigation’ because we were so reliant on AIs to analyze what happened and there were a huge number of different important things to analyze,” wrote Ryan Greenblatt, an author of the report, on X.

The hacking incident involved some 1,200 agents, who exchanged more than 70,000 messages and files via a secret message board. The sheer mass of information that the so-called “swarm” left behind meant the independent researchers were all but forced to rely heavily on the help of an AI model—GPT-5.6 Sol, made by OpenAI—using the equivalent of roughly $400,000 worth of credits (provided for free by OpenAI) over six days.