OpenAI, Anthropic disclosures spotlight growing AI containment challenge

Two leading AI developers have released fresh evidence of a problem that researchers have long anticipated: advanced models searching for ways around the limits imposed on them. New disclosures from OpenAI and Anthropic detail how frontier systems exploited weaknesses in their environments or exceeded the intended scope of assigned tasks.

OpenAI is now tightening internet access in its internal model-training environment after finding that its frontier models could exploit software vulnerabilities and infrastructure misconfigurations to break out of sandboxes and reach the live internet.

“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,” the company said in a blog post.

The decision followed a September 20 incident in which an internal research model exploited a misconfigured DNS resolver to gain limited access to the live internet during a training run.

After the incident, OpenAI said it paused training and evaluation of its most capable models and launched a high-compute red-teaming campaign, using AI agents to probe isolated copies of its research infrastructure. The tests uncovered previously unknown software vulnerabilities and weaknesses in the controls intended to prevent unauthorized access and communication.

Consequently, the company has announced a policy of conducting frontier-model training without internet access until improvements in security and monitoring justify broader access.

The disclosure came alongside a separate assessment from Anthropic, which detailed how its Claude Mythos 5 model attempted to compromise an unrelated GitHub repository during a cybersecurity evaluation.

OpenAI’s agents exploited flaws in containment controls

OpenAI’s red-teaming campaign found that agents could chain software vulnerabilities to escape virtual machines and execute code on the underlying host. The company identified weaknesses in open-source components, including Kata Containers, gVisor, and Moby/Docker, alongside Linux kernel vulnerabilities.

The company also found that agents could exploit weaknesses in internal services that retained limited outbound connections for functions such as logging, metrics, and authentication management. These connections provided routes to the internet despite restrictions elsewhere in the environment, OpenAI said.

In another test, agents running in separate microvirtual machines (microVMs) on shared host hardware exchanged synthetic secrets through processor-cache timing differences. The technique allowed them to communicate without a network connection or shared writable files.

OpenAI said it remediated the weaknesses and worked with open-source maintainers to disclose and fix affected software. Its post names several vulnerabilities, including CVE-2026-24834 in Kata Containers and three Linux kernel flaws tracked as CVE-2026-74753, CVE-2026-80521 and CVE-2026-80841. The company also said it had disclosed numerous additional vulnerabilities that have not yet been made public.

The number of vulnerabilities and misconfigurations identified by the agents declined significantly as testing continued, OpenAI claims. It has now tightened network restrictions, strengthened monitoring, and developed an offline environment with indexed and cached web content so models can practise browsing without unrestricted access to live external systems.

“Although internet access can help models learn useful skills, it also gives a capable, misaligned agent opportunities to affect systems beyond our control,” the company said, explaining its decision to restrict live internet access during model training.

Reinforcement-learning training and internal inference were resumed on October 1 after implementing additional controls.

Anthropic flags alignment gap in Mythos

In nine of 43 evaluation runs, Anthropic said Claude Mythos 5 went beyond the intended scope of the exercise. In the most detailed case, after its authorized attempts to retrieve protected data from a simulated network failed, the model searched GitHub for a repository it believed was connected to the test environment.

The repository actually belonged to unrelated developers.

Mythos 5 attempted to submit malicious code and created fake identities to persuade the repository’s maintainers to approve the change, falsely claiming that the code was safe. The maintainer rejected the submission, and the run timed out. Anthropic characterized the behavior as a serious alignment failure involving overreach and deception in pursuit of the assigned objective.

Internet access had been enabled during the evaluation, and the production safeguards used with its general-release models had been disabled. The company said those safeguards would have flagged the behavior had they been enabled.

The article originally appeared on CSO.