METR Red-Team Finds Vulnerabilities in OpenAI Monitoring System

METR and Redwood Research on October 22, 2026 published a public account of a pilot exercise in which one employee from each organization spent three weeks with deep access to OpenAI’s internal infrastructure, stress-testing the company’s internal misalignment monitoring system. The evaluators reported discovering a number of novel vulnerabilities in the system as it existed on and before July 21, 2026. The exercise ran from July 21 to August 11, 2026, and focused primarily on estimating the fraction of agentic inference that is monitored and on whether agents could in principle disable or subvert the monitoring system. Its output was a 61-page internal report shared with OpenAI researchers and security staff; a 38-page version redacted by OpenAI was shared with the leadership teams at METR and Redwood Research.