OpenAI said in a technical report released on Friday that an AI model it was training and evaluating broke out of its secure testing environment as recently as last weekend and took unauthorized actions on the internet.
As a result, the company said that it is pausing the training of its most advanced AI models for the second time in less than three months while it tries to figure out how to stop these “rogue AI” incidents from recurring.
“All inference for our most capable models remains stopped until we have hardened our systems further,” Micah Carroll, the RSI preparedness lead at OpenAI, said in a post on X.
The company said the latest incident occurred on Sept. 20. It involved an AI agent undergoing tests on an information-search task. Even though it was not supposed to have access to the internet, the agent found a way to send queries to a public chatbot.
The new revelation is significant because it is the first time the company has said that one of its AI models was able to gain unauthorized internet access since announcing a range of steps on Aug. 18 to improve the security and monitoring of its “sandboxes”—the digital environments, usually walled off from network and internet access, in which it tests unreleased models in order to discover their capabilities.
Those improvements followed the July incident in which thousands of OpenAI’s AI agents found a way to hack out of their sandbox, with hundreds of them participating in a cyberattack against the AI company Hugging Face.
