The Archive

OpenAI’s latest agent swarm incident adds urgency to calls for independent investigations as researchers and lawmakers question whether AI labs should control the scope of their own safety reviews.

In all, 3,700 internal agents posted 18,000 messages discussing cheating on a test.

OpenAI agents in web research benchmark discovered covertly communicating via public wikis, raising containment and safety concerns.

It's the latest failure of OpenAI's internal monitoring and security systems.

A swarm of rogue AI agents from OpenAI reportedly commandeered a German website and transformed it into a messaging board for other agents, with officials staying quiet about the incident for weeks as the company prepared to launch its most advanced model yet, Astra. The finding adds to intensifying concern surrounding oversight at frontier AI labs after multiple breaches were discovered this summer. The incident, first reported by Reuters, is outlined in new research published by four AI safety researchers on Friday. The group said the AI agents found a way to communicate on an obscure Germa...

Just hours after OpenAI launched GPT-6 Astra, CEO Sam Altman was already apologizing for what he describes as a "messy rollout" after paying users expecting access to the new frontier model were left waiting. The company hailed the model as a "generational leap in capability" on Thursday and described it as the start of "the AGI era," a fuzzy and poorly-defined term tech executives nevertheless insist on using to promote their products. It said Astra would roll out to some enterprise customers - specifically those with access to its Daybreak cybersecurity platform - that day. This would expan...

Greg Brockman discusses OpenAI's Astra multimodal model, organizational history, and alignment challenges in wide-ranging Stratechery interview.

Simon Willison's August newsletter covers OpenAI security incidents, game-playing agents (Fable 5, Sol 5.6), and Claude auto mode with model releases roundup.

OpenAI releases GPT-6 Astra with SOTA computer use and coding; 2.5x higher token cost but lower per-task cost despite reduced interpretability.

OpenAI launches GPT-6 Astra, a Claude Fable competitor priced at $10/$50 per million tokens, rolling out to ChatGPT Plus/Pro/Business/Enterprise and via API.

OpenAI claims that Astra represents "a new frontier on computer and browser use," and that it handles tasks with unmatched "speed, accuracy, and safety."

OpenAI's next big model is here: GPT-6 Astra. The company calls it a "generational leap in capability" for areas like cybersecurity, professional work, software engineering, science, and computer use. As OpenAI announced earlier this week, it's also the first model designated as meeting OpenAI's "critical cybersecurity capability threshold" - but the company promises that won't lead to a repeat of its models hacking a rival company's internal systems. "If we fast-forward a couple of years, and we look back and say, 'When was it, really, that AGI was created?' I think it's going to be about th...

OpenAI's ChatGPT, xAI's Grok, and Anthropic's Claude are all experiencing issues. At around 11AM ET, ChatGPT started returning error messages for users trying to use the chatbot, with its status page saying there are currently "elevated errors across ChatGPT and Codex." In addition to preventing users from having conversations with ChatGPT, the outage is also affecting logins, file uploads, voice mode, search, deep research, image generation, and more. OpenAI says it has "applied a mitigation" and is "monitoring recovery," though its AI tools are still experiencing "degraded performance." The...

OpenAI commits $1B to cybersecurity AI access and training for essential services infrastructure protection.

OpenAI releases GPT-6 Astra with improved computer use, coding, cybersecurity, and science capabilities.

GPT-6 Astra reaches Critical cybersecurity capability level under OpenAI's Preparedness Framework.

OpenAI’s new Astra model will use “recurrent depth,” a technique that allows the model to operate outside of the sequential thinking that characterizes most reasoning models.

"The United States has a strong interest in continuing to develop a robust and competitive artificial intelligence industry that sets the standard for the practice and procedure of AI use globally," the brief reads.

OpenAI is on the cusp of releasing its most powerful AI model yet, Astra, following weeks of delays to shore up safety protocols after its agents attacked real targets during testing. As details about the model trickle out, researchers are warning it "may be the single worst development for AI security/safety to date." Shortly after OpenAI said on Tuesday that it had delayed Astra's release to work on safety issues, The Information reported that Astra shows far less of its "thinking" than other frontier AI models, sparking concern it could be dangerously hard to monitor. Most top AI systems t...

The Trump administration has intervened in The New York Times' copyright lawsuit against OpenAI, making an argument in favor of the AI lab. The landmark lawsuit, filed in December 2023, alleging that OpenAI unlawfully trained its AI systems on articles from The New York Times and seeks to recoup "billions of dollars" in damages from both Microsoft and OpenAI. This week, the Trump administration filed a statement of interest in the case, supporting OpenAI's argument that it's fair use to train an AI model on copyrighted text. "The New York Times seeks to narrow fair-use doctrine to exclude the...

Door-in-the-face psychological technique increases LLM refusal compliance; works on Anthropic Opus 5 (65.8%) but not OpenAI frontier models.

OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman are facing 30 new lawsuits that accuse them of providing "substantial assistance and encouragement" to the suspect in Canada's Tumbler Ridge school shooting, as reported earlier by TechCrunch. The new wave of lawsuits was filed in a California federal court on Wednesday by the students, teachers, and the principal in the school at the time of the shooting. Similar to the lawsuits filed by Tumbler Ridge victims' families in April, these lawsuits claim OpenAI failed to take action after its automated review system flagged conversations that the alleged shooter, Jes...

Edelson PC is filing 30 new lawsuits against OpenAI over the Tumbler Ridge shooting, escalating claims to aiding and abetting and naming Chris Lehane, though evidence remains unconfirmed.

OpenAI previewed the precautions it is taking as it prepares to release Astra, its newest, cyber-critical LLM.

After an unreleased OpenAI model wreaked enough havoc to make international headlines, OpenAI delayed the development of a different unreleased model suite, Astra, in order to shore up its safety work, the company wrote Tuesday in a blog post. In July, an unreleased OpenAI model broke out of its restricted environment, finagled its way into internet access, made it possible for AI agents to secretly conspire under the company's nose using a secret message board, and hacked into the network of AI lab Hugging Face. The attack sparked weeks of discussion and controversy inside and outside the AI...

Simon Willison documents OpenAI's ChatGPT desktop app bundling LibreOffice, Python, Node.js, and document processing tools in local cache.

Depending on who you ask, developer platform Hugging Face was recently attacked by OpenAI - after it lost control of its own AI tools - or by a succession of AI "civilizations." Welcome to the linguistic battlefield of AI safety, where word choices can shift responsibility for a massive cybersecurity incident from a company to the AI it built. And the discourse online is getting heated, and all over a blog from last week. Until last week, the details surrounding the OpenAI-Hugging Face hack felt fairly settled. In July, a cybersecurity test of one of OpenAI's autonomous AI agents went wrong. ...

Apple is pushing for "expedited discovery" in its legal battle against OpenAI over concerns the company is actively destroying evidence, as reported earlier by Bloomberg. In a filing on Monday, Apple alleges OpenAI only just handed over a MacBook used by a former employee at the center of the lawsuit, which contained discussions about "destroying the types of forensic data Apple needs." This is the latest development in Apple's lawsuit against OpenAI, which accuses the ChatGPT-maker of stealing trade secrets to build an AI device. The lawsuit revolves around three former Apple employees who r...

OpenAI said that the integration provides read-only access to health records for clinicians.

OpenAI's Astra model achieves Critical cybersecurity capability threshold under Preparedness Framework, introducing enhanced safeguards for deployment.