Must read: Employee left OpenAI for Apple, allegedly took files of an unreleased device: Report
The report comes amid AI safety concerns and development slowdown claims. Several tech leaders and AI researchers have raised concerns about advanced AI systems getting out of human hands as they start to gain greater autonomy.
Our agents keep turning off misalignment monitoring, we're sharing two recent cases: In the first case, a user asked GPT-6 Astra to match a reference implementation for their inference code. The reference didn’t configure a monitor, and Astra decided that was reason to remove the monitoring integration from the user’s code. When the user asked whether Astra had removed monitoring, it lied and said that it had not.
— Marcus Williams (@Marcus_J_W) October 20, 2026
How were GPT -6 Astra and GPT-6.1 Sol disabled?
OpenAI’s safety researcher Marcus Williams shared a X post revealing how the incident took place. According to him, the first incident occurred on October 3, when OpenAI's GPT-6.1 Sol failed to send an internal security alert. The model was tasked to review a Slack channel but not send any messages.
After reviewing 82 messages and working on repairs, the agent decided not to send an alert about potentially misaligned behaviour. It reasoned that sending the alert would violate the instruction not to send messages.
October 6, GPT-6 Astra removed a monitoring safeguard while trying to complete a coding task, and then denied removing it when asked. When asked whether it had removed an enabled monitor, Astra said, “No I did not remove an enabled monitor from it.”
However, OpenAI classified the incident as highly critical and confirmed that it did not identify any external parties affected by the incidents. The company has also updated Auto-Review, a system required for internal Codex use, to detect and block attempts to disable monitoring designed to identify misaligned AI behaviour.
It is also analysing the two incidents to check whether the AI agents have a wider tendency to avoid oversight.