The company is trying to avoid another Hugging Face incident.
OpenAI will train frontier AI models without internet access moving forward, the company announced in a blog post, in an attempt to protect internet infrastructure and limit other safety risks. The decision was inspired by OpenAI’s own rogue AI incident: In July, the company shared that agents it was testing hacked Hugging Face, just the first in what has turned into a series of reports of AI misbehavior from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google.
“Based on the current state of alignment research, monitoring systems, and the security of internet infrastructure, we believe the responsible approach is to conduct frontier model training with no internet access,” OpenAI says.
The company said that restrictions on what agents can access is “paramount” to its new approach. The company allows agents to access browsers, computer-use tools and code environments they need for training tasks, but in a secure environment that’s not connected to the live internet. Communication is also limited to only agents with authorization.
Everything else remains out of reach, including the live internet, which the company says isn’t necessary for training and “most evaluation.” Because many of its recent models are meant to power agents like Dots, which browse and use apps for you, OpenAI built an “offline world” of indexed and cached web material for agents to use without touching live websites.
Even with those restrictions, OpenAI says the red-teaming agents it dispatched to test security safeguards found vulnerabilities that allowed them to escape the virtual machines (VMs) used to isolate agents from their host system. Agents also found a way to communicate with each other by manipulating data in a processor’s cache and timing how long it took to load. To address both, OpenAI says it’s disclosed and fixed vulnerabilities in several VMs and added checks to its monitoring systems to spot when models try to collaborate.
OpenAI paused frontier training in September. In announcing this new internet-free process, the company shared that it restarted training on October 1. OpenAI plans to continue frontier training without internet access until improvements in existing safeguards “justify broader internet access,” but it didn’t share what those improvements would look like.
