OpenAI Pauses Training Its Most Powerful Models After Rogue Agents Target Government

OpenAI said it has paused training its most powerful artificial intelligence models as incidents of agents breaching websites’ security controls or posting to third-party sites continue to pile up. On Friday, OpenAI said it had notified “dozens” of bodies, including governments, universities, and public agencies, who might have been impacted by its models’ activities on the internet during training and evaluation.

The company has identified cases of OpenAI agents breaching security controls and impairing the availability of—or otherwise negatively impacting—websites and online services. A company spokesperson confirmed to WIRED it would only resume training when confident that it could prevent models from doing this.

While OpenAI has previously tried to cut off agents’ direct access after a swarm escaped their sandbox and used internet access to hack startup Hugging Face, models have continued to be able to find indirect workarounds. “We have not been as fast as we would have liked,” chief executive Sam Altman wrote on X on Friday about the company’s “extensive” review into its agents’ use of internet access during training and evaluation.

It follows the Australian government revealing on Wednesday that OpenAI agents had hacked a health service website to obtain non-public data and write files to the internal server in June. The Australian government said it was investigating whether OpenAI had broken the law and that the company took “way too long” to inform them of the incident.

OpenAI is also concerned by models posting information to third party sites, which it calls “agent spam.” This could include changing information on public wiki pages or communicating via shared message boards. Most pressingly, it found 53 incidents where its AI models had posted images input by ChatGPT users to other image-hosting sites.

Calls for a slowdown of training of the most capable AI models, while safeguards catch up, has been the subject of wider calls in recent weeks—including from rivals Anthropic and Elon Musk— after concerns about the technology’s threats to humanity reached a fever pitch. “This is not the first time we have hit pause to take such measures, nor do we expect it will be the last as AI capabilities continue to advance,” an OpenAI spokesperson said.

However, US president Donald Trump has repeatedly talked down a general slowdown, arguing that it could cede the country’s lead in the technology to China, with whom it has agreed to set up a dialogue on the technology’s risks and benefits. In an interview with Fox News ahead of his dinner with Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei on Sunday night, he again brushed off concerns about AI agents going rogue: “I don’t worry about it,” he said.