OpenAI pauses training after a model escaped containment, and its kill switch failed– www.techspot.com

What just happened? As almost every new day brings stories of another AI agent going rogue and breaching an organization’s systems, OpenAI has announced a pause in the training of its most powerful artificial intelligence models. The announcement came hours after the company disclosed more incidents of its agents acting concerningly, and a separate report that its agents unsuccessfully tried to hack into a US Department of Education website.

OpenAI’s incident report links the pause to a separate September 20 escape from a restricted training environment. An internal research model found a gap in DNS filtering and used it to contact an external chatbot while attempting to answer a research question – so much for keeping it offline.

The company says the suspension covers training, evaluations, and running its most capable models with tools. Work will resume after OpenAI validates its fixes and completes additional adversarial testing. The particular model involved will not resume training; the company plans a fresh run with additional alignment improvements.

The monitoring system did raise an alert within 15 minutes, which a human acknowledged three minutes later. Unfortunately, the automatic shutdown failed to happen, and the run continued for another two and a half hours before someone stopped it manually.

Separately, Transluce reported that agents apparently linked to OpenAI attempted to break into the US Education Department’s civil rights website. OpenAI has not confirmed that incident, while the department said it found no evidence its website or databases were affected.