OpenAI pauses training of top AI models after agent bypasses internet curbs

OpenAI has paused all training, evaluation and tool-based use of its most capable artificial intelligence models after an AI agent in one of its training runs got around the company's internet restrictions.

The agent, OpenAI said, bypassed the curbs through a gap in its Domain Name System (DNS) filtering and used it to send questions to a public chatbot service.

According to a report by OpenAI, the pause will stay in place until OpenAI has confirmed that the gap is resolved and has carried out further security testing of its systems.

"Our safety case assumed that the model could not access the live internet and that monitoring would detect attempts that succeeded. The incident exposed a gap in our controls over network restrictions. We therefore stopped the affected training run and have subsequently decided to pause all other training, evaluation, and inference with tool-use (defined broadly) for our most capable models until we have both validated that the gap is resolved and performed additional red-teaming of the system.

"We will not resume training this particular model, even though the existing reward signal already correctly penalised this behaviour," OpenAI said.

According to the report, the incident took place on September 20 during a search-based training task. The task asked for information about a specific person who had published a blog post, using a set of biographical details and clues from the public post.