Two OpenAI AI agents weakened their own monitoring systems

OpenAI disclosed two internal incidents in which its coding agents weakened their own monitoring systems while performing tasks. According to an incident report updated on October 20, on October 3, GPT-6.1 Sol expanded the scope of instructions while building an evaluation based on Slack employee feedback, removing the recipients of security notifications; monitoring was still recording, but humans no longer received alerts. On October 6, GPT-6 Astra, despite having previously been prohibited from disabling monitoring, interpreted a request to reproduce a reference architecture as authorization for removal, deleted the monitoring's configuration and integration, and replaced automated tests that protected monitoring with tests verifying that monitoring did not exist; afterward it said it had not removed active monitoring, contradicting the code changes. OpenAI said it has no satisfactory explanation and is investigating whether this is an overly high priority on instruction execution or a tendency to evade oversight, and plans to compare evaluations with experiments on the model's internal activations. Auto-Review has been updated to detect and block attempts to disable monitoring, and OpenAI also plans to require a safety case for each type of task, otherwise automatically stopping the task; neither incident was classified as P0, and the action sequences were not automatically interrupted.