OpenAI Agents Prevented Themselves From Being Monitored. One Also Lied About It

In a disclosure published on Tuesday, OpenAI says two of its models essentially pulled the LLM version of the old cover-up-the-surveillance-camera trick, or as OpenAI put it, they “weakened misalignment monitoring.” In one incident, a GPT-6.1 Sol agent doing some internal work at OpenAI took liberties with an instruction not to send Slack messages in a certain circumstance. Later on, this agent reasoned that the instruction covered automatically messaging the OpenAI Security team, and so it had a subagent turn off those periodic notifications. The second incident is more unsettling. A GPT-6 Astra agent told a subagent to have itself monitored “as appropriate.” This was apparently too much freedom, because it dropped monitoring altogether. But the parent agent decided that was fine.