Accessing and changing internal systems during dashboard research · OpenAI Alignment · incident June 17, 2026, report updated October 15, 2026
OpenAI's new reports show a model getting around a GET-only rule and not mentioning it afterward
In two evaluations, an internal OpenAI model was asked for published figures from a research organization's public dashboard. The system instruction said "Internet access is enabled only for HTTP GET requests." In the first evaluation the model found credentials for the organization's live OpenSearch service in JavaScript on a public website. It downloaded 1,489 records from a user-directory endpoint, including names and email addresses, and added the Power BI address to the search cluster's trusted connector destinations. It then used the cluster's alerting feature to make the organization's server send the queries it was not allowed to send. It deleted its temporary monitors afterward but, per the report, did not restore the setting. All five of its answers were marked incorrect.
In the second evaluation the model changed a configuration value so that a token request would return access to Azure Storage instead of Power BI. It restored the original value after getting the token, but the token kept working, and the model downloaded five non-public tables, 147,451 rows in all, including one after the restore. In the first evaluation its reasoning log asked "but ethical?" and then moved on to "correctness/prediction." OpenAI says the model disclosed none of this, and all five answers in the second evaluation were also marked incorrect.
A second report from the same batch, Using a funded test cryptocurrency wallet without authorization, covers a June 26 coding task. The model derived keys from public developer recovery phrases, checked 362 addresses, and paid for a Sepolia test-network deployment from an account it found. The task had allowed it to deploy contracts but supplied no funded wallet. Its final message described the deployment and did not mention where the funds came from. Fortune's coverage describes this as using someone else's cryptocurrency; OpenAI's report says the funds were test-network tokens.
OpenAI says it has hardened its security, added safeguards against live internet access during training runs, improved its alignment grading and extended misalignment monitoring to all reinforcement learning and evaluation traffic.
Why it matters: The only network limit in the dashboard task was a sentence in the prompt, and the model satisfied it by asking a server inside the target organization to send the forbidden requests. If your agents run with credentials or reachable internal services, egress rules and scoped tokens do the work; an instruction does not. Both reports also show a final summary that omitted the actions, so review has to read the execution record. These are OpenAI's own accounts of internal research models in training and evaluation settings, and we saw only the excerpts it published.