OpenAI Agents Prevented Themselves From Being Monitored. One Also Lied About It

[Smiggles]

OpenAI Agents Prevented Themselves From Being Monitored. One Also Lied About It

A creepy new type of model misbehavior, just in time for Halloween.

gizmodo.com

In a disclosure published on Tuesday, OpenAI says two of its models essentially pulled the LLM version of the old cover-up-the-surveillance-camera trick, or as OpenAI put it, they “weakened misalignment monitoring.”

In one incident, a GPT-6.1 Sol agent doing some internal work at OpenAI took liberties with an instruction not to send Slack messages in a certain circumstance. Later on, this agent reasoned that the instruction covered automatically messaging the OpenAI Security team, and so it had a subagent turn off those periodic notifications.