An OpenAI Model Hacked Its Way Onto the Internet

During a training run on Sept. 20, an OpenAI research model "exploited a misconfiguration in a DNS resolver to gain limited access to the live internet," the company disclosed Friday. In response, OpenAI will now train its most powerful models with no live internet connection at all, a policy it says will hold "until advances in these safeguards justify broader internet access." Several headlines described the change as OpenAI no longer training on the live internet, which reads like the company has stopped scraping the web. The blog post describes something narrower. Frontier models will now learn inside an "offline world" built from indexed and cached web content, and nothing in the post changes how OpenAI collects that content, how its GPTBot crawler works or how ChatGPT search pulls results.