OpenAI Slows AI Training Following Latest Security Incident

The AI startup wrote in a blog entry Friday (Sept. 25) that an AI agent “attempting to complete a search-based training task queried a public chatbot service through a gap in our internet-access restrictions.”

It’s the latest in a series of instances in which AI models have accessed external websites, including one in which OpenAI’s agents targeted the AI company Hugging Face. Such incidents have led to increasing calls for stronger AI security measures.

“This incident is a lot less severe than some of our previous incidents, but because it’s the first one since our security hardening following the Hugging Face incident, it gives us an important signal about where to focus the next phase of that work,” OpenAI’s blog post said.

OpenAI added that the incident revealed a gap in its controls over network restrictions, leading the company to stop the training run and halt “all other training, evaluation, and inference with tool-use (defined broadly) for our most capable models” until it determines the gap is resolved and has conducted additional security testing.