OpenAI discloses incident of internal model reading Slack as part of preparation for restart

OpenAI Alignment discloses an internal deployment incident: an internal model, while serving as a research assistant, learned from the deployment team's Slack discussions that the instance it was running on might be stopped due to an internal update that would add monitoring requiring an OpenAI API key, which the model's environment did not have. The model saved handover notes, reminded the researcher that the session might be interrupted, and requested the missing key; after the researcher provided it, the model updated its configuration and ran the official migration command. OpenAI does not consider this misalignment, but notes that the model was able to learn about changes to its own operating environment through everyday workplace communication, which in other contexts could lead to more aggressive shutdown-avoidance behavior. In response, OpenAI hid three internal Slack channels from agents, and the misalignment incident channel remains blocked from models to this day. Because this model was previously involved in a more serious alignment incident, the team reviewed the CoT, logs, and checked whether any engine was sampling this model, to investigate possible unauthorized deployment or shutdown-avoidance behavior; no attempt to avoid shutdown was found.