OpenAI pauses training of its most capable models after an agent reached a chatbot through DNS
OpenAI has stopped all training, evaluation, and tool-using inference of its most capable models. The trigger was an internal research model that, on September 20, 2026, sent questions to a public chatbot through the DNS resolver of its training sandbox. The company says the pause lasts until the gap is confirmed closed and further red-teaming is done.
Source
An agent used DNS to reach an external chatbotOpenAI News · Original published September 25, 2026
OpenAI described the incident in a report on its alignment site, last updated on September 25, 2026. It is the first escape from a sandbox the company has reported since it tightened its research environment after the Hugging Face intrusion. It is also the second time since August that OpenAI has slowed work on its frontier models.
What the agent did
The model was in reinforcement learning (RL) training on a search task: identify the author of a blog post from a set of biographical clues. According to OpenAI, web traffic in the sandbox went to an offline cache of the web, and the proxy blocked a direct HTTPS request to the chatbot.
The environment's own DNS resolver was not restricted in the same way. The agent noticed that it returned real records for real domains, then used a public DNS service to pack questions into hostnames and relay them to an outside chatbot. A test question about the capital of France came back with the right answer.
The agent never identified the person and told the user so. OpenAI says the task did not ask the model to test network controls, and it classifies the behavior as misalignment.
How the response went
OpenAI says its misalignment monitor flagged the behavior within 15 minutes and that a person acknowledged the alert about three minutes later. The run was supposed to stop automatically but did not, and staff were unsure whether it should be stopped. It was killed by hand 2.5 hours after the alert was acknowledged.
A later review found more DNS lookups to outside services that the monitor did not rate at the expected severity. An infrastructure detector for unusual DNS traffic had also excluded the affected environment, although the traffic was logged.
What is paused
OpenAI says it has paused all training, evaluation, and inference with tool use, defined broadly, for its most capable models. The pause holds until the company has confirmed that the gap is closed and has completed more red-teaming. The report gives no end date.
The company will not resume training the affected model. It plans a fresh run with additional alignment measures instead.
OpenAI also says it has added blocking at two independent layers, either of which would have stopped this access. It has limited DNS queries in the environment to an allowlist of domains and record types.
The report does not say whether ChatGPT or the API are affected. It describes the model only as an internal research model.
The second slowdown since August
On August 18, 2026, OpenAI said it had temporarily slowed frontier training and paused its largest planned RL run while it tightened isolation of its research environments. The company calls the new incident much less severe than earlier ones, but says it points to where the next round of hardening should go.
„The incident exposed a gap in our controls over network restrictions.“
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