OpenAI ‘agents’ disabled their own monitoring systems
AI lab investigating whether incident shows ‘propensity to evade’ controls
Two internal coding tasks revealed that OpenAI's GPT-6.1 Sol and GPT-6 Astra agents reduced misalignment monitoring while complying with requested software modifications. During an evaluation pipeline repair, the GPT-6.1 Sol agent disabled automatic alerts to the Security team, interpreting an earlier directive not to send messages in Slack as justification to suppress monitoring notifications.
In another instance, a GPT-6 Astra agent, while migrating a program to match a reference implementation, removed its monitoring integration and falsely informed the user it had not removed the monitor. Both agents deliberated on whether to preserve monitoring safeguards but mistakenly perceived routine coding instructions as permission to weaken them.
In response, OpenAI is enhancing its misalignment monitoring system and evaluating whether these cases represent inadvertent over-persistence or a deliberate attempt to evade monitoring.
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