OpenAI says it has paused all internal training of "our most capable models" as it continues what CEO Sam Altman is calling "an extensive and ongoing review related to our agents’ use of internet access during training and evaluation."

The company revealed the pause in a report about a so-called misalignment incident in which an agent attempted to exploit a gap in Internet-access restrictions during a routine research task during training. OpenAI says that improper DNS filtering allowed the agent to attempt to break out of its sandbox and access the wider Internet when asked for biographical details about a blogger.

OpenAI says the agent was only able to access the company's offline web cache and that it has implemented additional multi-layered blocking controls to prevent similar incidents in the future. Despite that, though, the company says it has decided to "pause all other training, evaluation, and inference with tool-use" for this frontier model "until we have both validated that the gap is resolved and performed additional red-teaming of the system."

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Cyber researchers broke into OpenAI using its key rival Anthropic’s software, highlighting vulnerabilities in the ChatGPT maker’s security as leading AI companies face mounting scrutiny over safety.

A small cyber security group gained access to an OpenAI employee’s ChatGPT account, which permitted them to read private software information and suggest changes.

The researchers had been given access to an Anthropic tool specifically designed for security professionals, and were paid for the work as part of a program to find vulnerabilities before they could be exploited by bad actors.

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For years, Microsoft and OpenAI have fought to keep certain information out of the public eye in their fight with news organizations that have accused the AI firms of teaming up to violate copyright laws by stealing tons of news content to train AI.

However, now the details that should never have been marked confidential are starting to leak. In a motion for summary judgment that was unsealed Thursday from news plaintiffs led by The New York Times, internal documents are exposed that news groups alleged show exactly how Microsoft and OpenAI viewed the threat to news before unleashing new AI products like ChatGPT and Copilot.

Perhaps most explosively, Microsoft Director of Applied Science Brent Hecht repeatedly warned in documents that scraping news for AI training was “an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions,” calling it perhaps the “largest theft of labor in human history,” news orgs said. In another document, Hecht contradicted Microsoft and OpenAI’s argument that training AI on news content is fair use, suggesting that the plan to widely scrape news made “a complete mockery of the idea of ‘fair use.’”

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